It is now one of the imposed figures of the Cannes Film Festival, spring or summer version. Almost the obvious: as sure as the carpet stretched out in front of the Palais des Festivals is red, the Russian Kirill Serebrennikov is absent from the festivities. This has been going on since 2017 and it is not about to change before, at best, 2023. House arrest, ban on leaving the country … Year after year, the scenario repeats itself: the brilliant director remains in the country while his films illuminate the Croisette.
The axiom has entered people’s heads so well that this year, the announcement of Serebrennikov’s absence did not cause any particular stir. As if we had gotten used to seeing his works speak for him – this year it will be Petrov’s Fever, free adaptation of a novel by writer Alexeï Salnikov, in which the daily life of a family in Yekaterinburg takes a surreal turn when its three members contract the flu. A film competing in the Official Selection.
Stopped during a shoot
Nothing to do with the 2018 edition, where the man of the theater and the cinema had the right to an armchair – empty – decorated with a plaque in his name. At the time, that of the presentation of Leto, a film full of nostalgia on rock during the last years of the Soviet Union, an important mobilization had taken place, even beyond cultural circles.
The French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, went so far as to write to Vladimir Poutine to ask him to make a gesture. The Russian response evoking “Independence of justice”, read on stage by the general delegate of the Festival, Thierry Frémaux, had provoked a happy burst of laughter.
It is indeed a case of justice which pursues Kirill Serebrennikov, 51 years old and an air of eternal adolescent, since his last visit to Cannes, in 2016, for The Disciple. The following year, the director was arrested while filming Leto, accused of having embezzled 1.8 million euros of public subsidies as part of a theatrical project supported by the Ministry of Culture.
Interminable trial
Under house arrest for nearly two years, the director was sentenced, in June 2020, to three years in prison, a sentence accompanied by a ban on leaving the country. This guilty verdict was nevertheless greeted with relief by his relatives and supporters, persuaded to see Serebrennikov end his life in prison and thus pay for his freedom of tone in a Russia where conservatism and authoritarianism are growing together.
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