Yuri Viktorovich Kara was born in Donetsk. He graduated from the physical and chemical faculty of the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys. During his studies he headed a pop group at the institute. Then he worked as an engineer-radio physicist in Donetsk. In 1982 he entered the VGIK (the All-Union Institute of Cinema, which he graduated in 1987. He gained first success due to his VGIK graduation work Tomorrow There Was a War, a visual stylization of the film of the 1930s. In 1990 he represented The Feasts of Belshazzar, or a Night with Stalin in the USA, where it was showed in the American congress, among other places. He directed the popular children’s comic series Eralash and commercials.