‘Stop the war’: Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev appeals to Putin | Cannes Film Festival

Honorable director Andrey Zvyagintsev has sent a message to Vladimir Putin urging him to listen to the Russian people and end the “senseless” war in Ukraine, continuing the war of words between Russia’s most respected filmmakers and the Kremlin that began in Ukraine. Cannes Film Festival awards ceremony at the end of the week.

“Apart from the removal of organs from fellow citizens in the name of a false goal, apart from killing young people who the country needs to build a life and a future – nothing good is near if we do not stop,” said the auteur who was released in a message sent to the press secretary of the President of Russia through official channels on Tuesday.

Accepting the Grand Prix for his new film Minotaur on the French Riviera on Saturday night, Zvyagintsev asked Putin to “stop this animal (…) the whole world is waiting for this.”

Zvyagintsev led the discussion by acknowledging that Putin would not pursue Cannes alone, and urged the Russian leader’s team to file the appeal instead.

When Putin’s former spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked about sending an anti-war message at a press conference on Monday, however, he rejected the idea. “I, I will not do it,” Peskov told reporters at the daily press conference. “I don’t think anyone would.”

Peskov said that the director of award-winning films such as The Return and Leviathan had no “right” to ask for peace because he did not oppose the “killings in Donbas” – the alleged violence against Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine that the Russian campaign is using as a reason to claim that it wants to go to war.

Responding to Peskov on Tuesday morning, which was seen by the Guardian, Zvyagintsev said that he had no say in the matter, and “hundreds of millions of Russians”, because Putin “never heard their voice”.

For the Kremlin to block his opponents with a counter-question, “But where have you been for the last eight years?”, Zvyagintsev said, “it was hypocritical”. “The only thing that would have been right and reasonable,” he continued, “would have been to act according to the principle of here and now – here and now: it would be to end the war mercilessly as pointless. “

The Kremlin did not respond to the filmmaker’s message.

Zvyagintsev’s Cannes speech also received criticism from Ukraine, where commentators speculated it continued the tradition of “appeal to the king” – in which Russian critics asked the authorities to change rather than force them – and put the lives of Russian soldiers on par with Ukrainian civilians.

Minotaur, which appeared in Cannes to good reviews, is the first film in 62 years since he suffered from severe Covid-19 and later moved to France.

An adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 erotica The Unfaithful Wife is set in the fictional Russian city of Krasnoborsk, following a business magnate (Dmitriy Mazurov) who is about to downsize employees to recruits. Ukraine war when he found out that his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) has an affair.