Standing at the Cannes podium Saturday night to collect the Grand Prix for “Minotaur,” exiled Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev used his acceptance speech to issue a direct, personal plea to Vladimir Putin to bring the war to an end.
Set in Russia in 2022, “Minotaur” follows Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), a successful company director whose carefully ordered life unravels under mounting corporate pressures and an increasingly volatile world, the disintegration tipping toward violence. The French-German-Latvian co-production marks Zvyagintsev’s first feature in close to a decade, reuniting him with cinematographer Mikhail Krichman and production designer Andrey Ponkratov. Iris Lebedeva also stars.
After thanking the jury and MK2 Films co-CEO Nathanael Karmitz, Zvyagintsev said:
“There is someone else I would like to address personally today, on my own behalf. He is not using a VPN to watch this ceremony live, but I am certain, in fact, that he has other decisions to make – far more important ones – at this very moment. Nor is he using the internet to hear this statement I am making to him, but I know there are people around him, his entourage, who will convey these words to him. And here are those: ‘Millions of people on both sides of the front line dream of only one thing: for the massacres to stop. The only person who can stop this butchery is the President of the Russian Federation. Put an end to this carnage; the whole world is waiting for it.’”
Reviewing the film for Variety, Guy Lodge wrote: “The film functions as both a classical, supremely well-made domestic thriller, and as a bristling state-of-the-nation takedown, identifying Putin’s principles of entitlement, intimidation and denial in places both obvious – a mayoral office, a military draft center – and more quietly coded. Unaccountable despotism, it turns out, begins at home.”
“Minotaur” is also in competition at the Sydney Film Festival, with its Australian premiere set for June 12.
From Variety US
Love Film & TV?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in music, film and TV in Australia and abroad.
