France’s Oscar submission race for 2027 is shaping up around one particularly thorny question: What happens to a major film by an exiled filmmaker when no other country is realistically positioned to claim it?
That is the dilemma surrounding Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur,” a scathing portrait of corruption in Putin’s Russia that won the Grand Prize at Cannes and is emerging as one of the strongest contenders to represent France in the international feature Oscar race.
As in most years, many of the likely French Oscar candidates have emerged from the Croisette, but the 2027 field is striking for the number of prominent foreign filmmakers who made films in France or with substantial French financing, including Zvyagintsev, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Cristian Mungiu and Asghar Farhadi.
A dissident Russian filmmaker, Zvyagintsev is living in France with asylum status, while the film was largely financed and produced out of France by Charles Gillibert’s CG Cinema and MK2 Films, which reps international sales. Russia is not expected to submit it — especially after Zvyagintsev bravely used his Cannes acceptance speech to urge Putin to end the war. Its other coproducing countries have already picked other films: Germany selected Sandra Wollner’s “Everytime,” while Latvia, a minority co-producer, chose “Ulya.”
