PARIS: Exiled Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev takes on Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine in “Minotaur”, a drama about conscription and moral compromise released nearly five years after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion.
The film, which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival this year and is an entry for the 2027 Oscar for best international film, is released as debate persists over Russia’s ability to sustain troop numbers in a conflict that has left hundreds of thousands dead or wounded.
One scene shows Russian conscripts boarding a bus for the front, with a father saying goodbye to his teenage son, while the mother of another screams in anguish. Later, the image of an older recruit appears on a roadside billboard: he is dead and celebrated as a war hero.
The story centres on Gleb, the owner of a logistics company who is coming to grips with his wife having an affair, while being pressured by the local mayor to identify 14 employees for military service.
Unwilling to send his existing workers to the front, he recruits new drivers with promises of high salaries, only to dispatch them straight to the war.
“For a director who has lived there, was born there, and speaks only Russian … how could he not talk about what has become the main, if not the most important, event of recent years?” Zvyagintsev said of himself in an interview with Reuters.
The 62-year-old director, best known internationally for “Leviathan” and “Loveless”, both Oscar nominated, now lives in France, having left Russia in 2021, months before Moscow launched what it calls its special military operation in Ukraine.
