Black beast of the Kremlin, long under house arrest, Kirill Serebrennikov had been deprived of climbing the steps for his first two Cannes selections with very rock Leto and the uncomfortable satire Petrov Fever. Kirill Serebrennikov, artistic director of the Gogol Center in Moscow, was arrested by Russian police in 2017, accused of embezzlement of public funds and charged with “fraud”.
A visit with a political dimension
The Russian director, a great defender of the rights of homosexuals in Russia, was able to leave Russia in March 2022, after a remission of sentence. He lives in Berlin. “I left Russia because I had the opportunity to do this legally,” he said then. Serebrennikov refuses to speak of exile, evoking a “new page” in his life”. His 90-year-old father still lives in Russia, in Rostov-on-Don, a border town with Ukraine.
The coming to Cannes of Serebrennikov, whose mother is Ukrainian, has a political dimension, against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, and while the Cannes Film Festival has officially declared persona non grata any representative or supporter of the official Kremlin line.
If the artists “decide to live forever in Moscow and work for power, that’s their choice, I don’t want to judge them. Others try to start a whole new life, it’s their choice too, ”says the Russian filmmaker. “I made my choice. I can only speak for myself”, he adds, claiming to feel “horror, sadness, shame and pain” in the face of the Russian invasion.