(Paris) Ukraine will be present “in everyone’s mind” in May at the 75and Cannes Film Festival, in the south-east of France: two generations of filmmakers from this country at war since the Russian invasion will present films evoking conflicts and the displacement of populations.
Posted at 12:21 p.m.
They will rub shoulders with a film by a Russian iconoclast, that of Kirill Serebrennikov, who left his country legally and whose new opus Tchaikovsky’s wife will be in official competition.
“Everywhere in the world, we continue to make cinema, including in countries like Ukraine” where “cinema is not the major concern at the moment”, underlined Thursday the general delegate of the Cannes Film Festival, Thierry Fremaux.
“Of course, the question of the war in Ukraine is in everyone’s mind and it will be, I hope, in those of the festival-goers as well,” he added.
The Cannes Film Festival announced in early March that it would not host Russian delegations or “the presence of any government-related body” as long as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continued. A measure that does not apply to artists breaking with the regime.
Known for his daring creations, his support for LGBT+ people and his indirect criticism of Putin’s regime, Kirill Serebrennikov, 52, is in competition at Cannes for the third time.
He is also a director and will open the Avignon Festival in July, in the south-east of France.
He has so far never been able to go to the Cannes Film Festival, nor for Leto (2018) nor for Petrov fever (2021), because he was then banned from leaving Russia, due to an embezzlement case for which he had been convicted in 2020.
1er April, he confirmed to AFP that he had left Russia legally and was in Berlin, after a remission in this case, considered politicized by his supporters.
A multi-faceted artist, he is also currently rehearsing at the Amsterdam Opera, a production of the opera Der Freischütz (the maverick) by composer Carl Maria von Weber.
Prophetic movies?
In the midst of the war in Ukraine, the festival selected out of competition a well-known Ukrainian filmmaker, Sergei Loznitsa, and his compatriot Maksim Nakonechnyi, who is directing his first film.
“Selecting a film at Cannes is still an artistic selection, there are two Ukrainian films that are there, one of which evokes the war in Donbass a year ago two or three years ago but which one can believe was filmed 15 days ago,” commented Mr. Frémaux.
Sergei Loznitsa’s new film is called The Natural History of Destruction and will be presented in a special session.
It is based on a text by the German essayist WG Sebald (1944-2001), in which the massive destruction of German cities by massive Allied air raids during World War II is described.
Regularly invited to Cannes, with films like Maidanon the Ukrainian revolution, or DonbassSergei Loznitsa, 57, was on the Croisette last year to present Babi Yarabout the massacre of more than 30,000 Jews in 1941, west of Kyiv.
In March, in reaction to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the filmmaker, whose films on Ukraine take on a prophetic allure, compared present-day Russia to the Soviet regime.
“Contemporary Russia is an official heir to the USSR. You could say that it applies exactly the same methods to the Republics that surround it,” he told AFP.
In the Un certain regard category, the young Maksim Nakonechnyi presents Bachennya Metelyka (Butterfly Vision).
According to Mr. Frémaux, the film revolves around a young teacher “who joined the war and was kidnapped” and who “returns to the country for the benefit of an exchange of prisoners”.