At the 79th Cannes Film Festival, the premiere of a new film by director Andrey Zvyagintsev entitled “Minotaur” was held – his first film after a break of about 10 years.
After the screening, the festival audience applauded the film for eight minutes, the Telegram channel “Beware, News” wrote. Zvyagintsev himself gave a short speech to the audience.
I will only have words of thanks. I am grateful for our permanent collection, which has been scattered like splinters all over the world. <…> I am very grateful to our producers in France, Germany and Latvia, who made the film in Russian possible. I am eternally grateful to the actors, most of whom I photographed for the first time. <...> And of course to you, spectators, in the great hall of Lumière, which welcomed us once again within its walls. We are happy to be back able to do our work.
The film tells the story of the manager of a company preparing for massive layoffs, who discovers that his wife is having an affair with another man. The main roles in the film were played by Iris Lebedeva, Dmitry Mazurov, Varvara Shmykova and Yuri Zavalnyuk. The film “Minotaur”, said Zvyagintsev, was filmed in Riga. He noted in an interview that viewers are unlikely to recognize the capital of Latvia in the film. The director said: “Only the owners of these sets and interiors will recognize them. Otherwise, the audience will not know them. Because we are shooting the film as if we were in Russia. Now we are shooting that way.”
Andrei Zvyagintsev’s previous film, “Loveless”, was released in 2017. During the epidemic, Zvyagintsev became seriously ill with Covid and underwent a long rehabilitation process abroad, and after the outbreak of a large-scale war, he never returned to Russia.