His troubles with Vladimir Putin's regime, which had put him in the crosshairs of Russian justice and banned him from leaving the territory, had deprived him of climbing the steps for his first two selections in the race for the Palme d'Or:
Leto
and
Petrov Fever
.
His teams can just hold up a sign in his name.
With the 75th Cannes Film Festival opening on May 17, Russian filmmaker and Kremlin pet peeve Kirill Serebrennikov will finally be able to make his return to the Croisette with fanfare.
To discover
Discover the “Best of the Goncourt Prize” collection
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The 52-year-old director, who was finally able to leave Russia legally in March, will be in official competition at Cannes with the biopic
Tchaikovsky's wife
, which will chronicle the disastrous marriage of convenience of the composer Tchaikovsky in 1877. His union with Antonina Miliukova quickly turned to the sour and the couple lived apart after six weeks.
The unfortunate wife ends her life in an insane asylum.
Known for his daring creations, his support for LGBT + and his indirect criticism of the Putin regime, Serebrennikov was until recently banned from leaving Russia, due to an affair of embezzlement for which he had been sentenced in 2020. The filmmaker is now in Berlin where he intends to settle, after an unexpected remission of sentence in this case, considered politicized by his supporters.
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Also a director, Kirill Serebrennikov will open the Festival d'Avignon in July.
Its director Olivier Py offered Serebrennikov to open the In, on July 7, with his production
of Chekhov's
Black Monk .
Ukraine highlighted on the Croisette
In the midst of the war in Ukraine, the Festival selected two directors from this country out of competition.
A well-known filmmaker, Sergei Loznitsa, and Maksim Nakonechnyi, who directs his first film.
Loznitsa's new film is called
The Natural History of Destruction
and will be shown in a special screening.
Regularly invited to Cannes, with films like
Maïdan,
on the Ukrainian revolution, or
Donbass
, the 57-year-old director was on the Croisette last year to present
Babi Yar
, on the massacre of more than 30,000 Jews in 1941, at the west of Kyiv.
In March, in reaction to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the filmmaker, whose films take on, alas, a prophetic allure, compared present-day Russia to the Soviet regime.
In the Certain Regard category, the young Maksim Nakonechnyi presents
Bachennya Metelyka (“Butterfly Vision”).
The film revolves around a young teacher
"who enlisted in the war and was kidnapped"
and who
"returns to the country for the benefit of a prisoner exchange"
.
Proof that Cannes, as Pierre Lescure said, on the eve of his last presidency of the Festival, will put cinema back at the heart of world life.
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