Andrey Zvyagintsev faced the Cannes press corps Tuesday for his competition entry Minotaur, his first film made entirely outside Russia, and argubly his most directly political work of his career.
Set in the fictional Russian city of Krasnoborsk in 2022 and shot entirely in Riga, Latvia, Minotaur follows a shipping company CEO (played by Dmitriy Mazurov), whose investigation into his wife’s infidelity (Iris Lebedeva) gradually gives way to a reckoning with state violence, conscription and moral collapse. Visually, the film renders its world — grim housing estates, empty streets, surveillance-era interiors — with the cold precision of a crime scene.
Zvyagintsev has lived in exile in France since suffering a near-fatal bout of COVID in 2020 that left him temporarily unable to move — a period that coincided almost exactly with Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Calling his return to Cannes one of “the best things that happened to me” over the past nine years, Zvyagintsev said that despite his time abroad, he was still intimately aware of the situation inside Russia. “I 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.”
