(Paris) The latest film by Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravičius, killed in early April in Mariupol in Ukraine where he had shot it, will be presented out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival, which announced it on Thursday.
Posted at 2:18 p.m.
Mariupolis 2which “shows the life that continues under the bombs and reveals images as tragic as they bring hope”, has been added to the official list of films, just a few days before the opening of the 75and Cannes Film Festival Tuesday.
It will be screened on May 19 and 20, it is specified in a press release.
The entire Festival program will have the war in Ukraine as a backdrop, inevitably “in everyone’s mind”, according to its general delegate Thierry Frémaux.
Two generations of Ukrainian filmmakers will be present, with regular Sergei Loznitsa for The Natural History of Destructionon the destruction of German cities by the Allies during the Second World War, but also the young Maksim Nakonechnyi for Bachennya Metelyka (In some perspective).
Mantas Kvedaravičius, to whom we owe Barzakh (2011), mariupolis (2016) and Parthenon (2019), was killed trying to leave Mariupol, a port city in southeastern Ukraine.
PHOTO JANIS LAIZANS, REUTERS ARCHIVES
Hanna Bilobrova, fiancée of the director
“In 2022, he returned to Ukraine, in the Donbass, in the heart of the war, to find the people he had met and filmed between 2014 and 2015. Following his death, his producers and collaborators put everything to continue to transmit its work, its vision, its films”, specifies the festival in its text.
“His fiancée, Hanna Bilobrova, who accompanied him, was able to bring back the images shot there and put them together with Dounia Sichov, the editor of Mantas”, he adds.
The latter said she was “very moved to announce” the screening. “Mantas, thank you,” she tweeted.
His previous film, mariupolis (2016), told the story of a city under siege.
Born in 1976, Mantas Kvedaravicius made a name for himself with this film, shot in Mariupol and presented for the first time at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016.
Also a doctor in anthropology, Mantas Kvedaravičius wanted to testify as a filmmaker, “as far as possible from the agitation of the media and politicians”, according to the press release.