A young woman entered the red carpet of the Cannes Film Festival when climbing the steps to shout her anger against the abuses of Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
A few days after Volodymyr Zelensky’s remarked speech at the opening ceremony of the 75th Cannes Film Festival, the violence of reality and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine once again came to the Croisette.
The naked body, the lower abdomen stained with blood and the chest made up by the Ukrainian flag and crossed out with the inscription “Stop Raping Us” (“Stop raping us”), a demonstrator thus managed to enter the red carpet Three thousand years waiting for you to express his anger at the war in Ukraine.
Still unidentified, the young woman ripped off her clothes and chanted several times “Stop raping us”, before being evacuated by the security service. This cry of anger, which will remain one of the strong images of the fortnight, occurred the day after the screening of Mariupol 2 in Special Screening.
Filmed by the Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravičius, killed in early April in Ukraine by the Russian occupiers while shooting his feature film, this documentary on the horrors of the conflict and on “the life which continues under the bombs” was co-directed by his fiancée, Hanna Bilobrova, who brought the footage back to deliver it to editor Dounia Sichov.