A year in hospital with 90% lung damage: how Andrey Zvyagintsev survived Covid and returned to Cannes | Cannes Film Festival

Hthe films have been hailed as grim tales of the apathy of the Russian people as they are oppressed by the government. However, when the director Andrey Zvyagintsev when he heard that his country invaded Ukraine in February 2022, he also became paralyzed, and that was it.

A serious illness with Covid-19 left the filmmaker hospitalized in Hanover, Germany, struggling to breathe with 90% lung damage and unable to move or feel his legs for months. “I was in this region when I heard about the outbreak of war in Ukraine,” he said in a recent interview. “It was amazing; I felt a lot of pain and a lot of despair.” In total, he spent 11 months in various hospitals.

However Zvyagintsev recovered. He also learned to walk and hold a spoon, and was able to return his grief to filmmaking. The sequel will be shown on Tuesday in France at Cannes – the country where he chose to go into exile and the festival that cemented his reputation as the most important director in Russia. the launch of Leviathan in 2014the most powerful crime drama in the Old Testament.

Titled Minotaur, this new film adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969’s Unfaithful Wife, is set in a middle-class town. It follows a marketing executive (Dmitriy Mazurov) who is about to fire his employees after discovering that his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is having an affair.

At Cannes, Zvyagintsev won the best screen and jury awards but never the main prize, and this year he will compete for the Palme d’Or against auteur heavyweights such as Pedro Almodóvar, László Nemes and Asghar Farhadi. But his nine-year absence from the world of cinema means that the 62-year-old’s return to the red carpet will be a big event.

“Many works of art have been disrupted due to political changes Russia has taken,” said Julian Graffy, professor of Russian literature and film at University College London.” “But since Zvyagintsev was so important to the new group of directors that emerged in the early 1900s, the end of his voice is the most painful of all.”

Born in Novosibirsk, Siberia, Zvyagintsev spent most of his 40 years trying to make it as an actor, first in the Red Army theater group and then at the Moscow Russian Institute of Theater Arts. After struggling to make money as a film extra and street cleaner, he found his calling in directing, supporting police dramas and dramas for Russian television at the turn of the century.

His first feature, 2003’s The Return, set a more serious tone. A troubled father returns to his troubled family after years away to take his two sons to a mysterious island in the North Sea, where he subjects them to a series of punishing trials.

Beautifully shot, gentle and allegorical without a simple moral lesson, it won the Golden Lion at its premiere at the Venice film festival, and became famous because one of its young stars drowned shortly after filming, in an accident that revealed its plot.

Unexpected figures of male dominance became a topic. In the book The Banishment (2007), he is a criminal husband who took his gun when his wife told him that she was pregnant but the child was not his; in Elena (2011) is a millionaire tycoon who changes his will to destroy his partner when he asks for financial support for his son from a previous marriage.

It’s 2014 Leviathanhowever, those tyrannical judges became well-known political figures, unchallenged because of their affiliation with the state or the church. It’s the mild-mannered and conniving mayor who beats Nikolai (Aleksey Serebryakov) a compulsive driver, the government officials who refuse to listen to Nikolai’s writings, and the Orthodox priest who blesses the mayor’s vindictive plan.

In 2017’s Loveless, it’s a religious CEO who has ordered the divorce of his co-workers in violation of the company’s rules, which causes panic in the heart of the waiting divorce Boris and prompts other employees to hire fake women to appear.

The defeat in which Zvyagintsev’s people accept such injustice is often unbearable, even if those who rebel against them – such as Leviathan’s Nikolai – are ultimately shown to be doomed. He said: “I think that pretending that I have the right to say anything is pointless. he told the Guardian in 2014. “I have never voted in my life, because I believe that in our system it is a meaningless step.”

Refusal to see these films as dire threats to Russian society in the Putin era amounts to willful blindness or weaponized cynicism. Zvyagintsev found himself with the latter, by persistence interviews that Leviathan was inspired by a real story in the USor that his intention was really “not to fight for power”. But there’s a picture of Putin on the wall of the corrupt mayor’s office, and brutal parents are randomly beating their children for watching news of the war in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Russian officials have met late with show-don’t-tell. Although 35% of Leviathan’s budget came from Russia’s culture ministry, then-minister Vladimir Medinsky later said he did not like the film and accused its director of only thinking about “fame, red carpets, and statues”. “All flowers can bloom,” the minister of culture told Le Monde wistfully when asked about the future income of Zvyagintsev’s films, “but we only water what we like.”

Medinsky, an ultranationalist historian, is now leading the Russian delegation in peace talks with Ukraine.

Zvyagintsev, meanwhile, severed trade relations with his country. He also said he chose not to return to Russia while recovering from Covid in Germany, “because I don’t want to be associated with what my country has done”. Minotaur, like Loveless before it, was made without the help of the Russian government, and is the first of his last five films not to be written by his old friend, Oleg Negin, who lives in Russia.

However, his focus on morality is not in the right place. Although it was filmed in Riga, Latvia, Minotaur is set in the fictional Russian town of Krasnoborsk in 2022 – the year Putin has fully invaded.