{"id":274,"date":"2026-05-20T10:06:22","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T10:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uspropertymoves.com\/?p=274"},"modified":"2026-05-20T10:06:22","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T10:06:22","slug":"andrey-zvyagintsev-on-russian-corruption-war-and-exile-i-know-what-i-am-talking-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uspropertymoves.com\/?p=274","title":{"rendered":"Andrey Zvyagintsev on Russian Corruption, War and Exile: \u201cI Know What I Am Talking About.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nAndrey Zvyagintsev faced the Cannes press corps Tuesday for his competition entry Minotaur<\/em>, his first film made entirely outside Russia, and argubly his most directly political work of his career.<\/p>\n

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\n\tSet in the fictional Russian city of Krasnoborsk in 2022 and shot entirely in Riga, Latvia, Minotaur<\/em> follows a shipping company CEO (played by Dmitriy Mazurov), whose investigation into his wife\u2019s infidelity (Iris Lebedeva) gradually gives way to a reckoning with state violence, conscription and moral collapse. Visually, the film renders its world \u2014 grim housing estates, empty streets, surveillance-era interiors \u2014 with the cold precision of a crime scene. <\/p>\n

\n\tZvyagintsev has lived in exile in France since suffering a near-fatal bout of COVID in 2020 that left him temporarily unable to move \u2014 a period that coincided almost exactly with Putin\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. <\/p>\n

\n\tCalling his return to Cannes one of \u201cthe best things that happened to me\u201d over the past nine years, Zvyagintsev said that despite his time abroad, he was still intimately aware of the situation inside Russia. \u201cI left Russia 6 years ago but I spent about 60 years in the country. I know a lot about corruption. I know what I am talking about.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tGiven the \u201ccurrent Russian content,\u201d Zvyagintsev said, with the ongoing war in Ukraine, mounting casualties on both sides and state-run propaganda dominating the airwaves, he felt it was \u201cimportant to make this film\u2026it was a perfect pretext to say some important things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more How Cannes Animated Satire \u2018Jim Queen\u2019 Cast Gay Porn Icon Fran\u00e7ois Sagat<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tBut at the press conference, Zvyagintsev avoided overt political statements, arguing that \u201csometimes it is better to indulge in silence and rely on gestures.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tZvyagintsev said he began thinking about the idea for the film, a loose adaptation of Claude Chabrol\u2019s The Unfaithful Wife<\/em> (1969) after making his 2017 feature Loveless<\/em>, well before the full scale invasion of Ukraine. But the invasion, and Russia\u2019s military mobilization of fighting-age men, began shortly after he started working on the script, leading him to include them in the story \u201cto fill the gaps\u201d in Chabrol\u2019s film. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe director\u2019s relationship with Russian cultural authorities has long been fraught. His Oscar-nominated Leviathan<\/em>, which premiered in Cannes, winning best screenplay, received state funding, but it earned a sharp rebuke from then-culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, who later suggested the ministry had no plans to support Zvyagintsev\u2019s future projects.<\/p>\n

Read more \u2018In Waves,\u2019 Park Chan-Wook Deals End Cannes Market With A Bang<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The director presented his new film, ‘Minotaur,’ his first shot outside Russia, in competition in Cannes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[313,8,2,314,268,315],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting","tag-andrey-zvyagintsev","tag-cannes-2026","tag-international","tag-minotaur","tag-russia","tag-vladimir-putin"],"yoast_head":"\nAndrey Zvyagintsev on Russian Corruption, War and Exile: \u201cI Know What I Am Talking About.\u201d - US Property Moves<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/uspropertymoves.com\/?p=274\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Andrey Zvyagintsev on Russian Corruption, War and Exile: \u201cI Know What I Am Talking About.\u201d - 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