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.
