Accoladed director Andrey Zvyagintsev has sent a direct message to Vladimir Putin urging him to start listening to the Russian people and end the “senseless” war in Ukraine, continuing a war of words between Russia’s most revered living film-maker and the Kremlin that started at the Cannes film festival awards ceremony over the weekend.
“Except for the limbs torn off from your fellow citizens in the name of an illusory goal, except for the massacre of young people that the country needs to build life and the future – nothing good is on the horizon if we don’t stop,” the exiled auteur said in a message sent to the Russian president’s press secretary through official channels on Tuesday.
Accepting the Grand Prix for his new film Minotaur on the French Riviera on Saturday night, Zvyagintsev had appealed to Putin to “stop this butchery […] the whole world is waiting for this.”
Zvyagintsev had prefaced his speech with an acknowledgment that Putin was unlikely to follow the Cannes livestream personally, and urged the Russian leader’s entourage to relay the appeal instead.
When Putin’s longstanding spokesperson Dmitry Peskov was asked about passing on the anti-war message at a press conference on Monday, however, he flatly rejected the idea. “I, for one, will not do it,” Peskov told reporters at a daily briefing. “I do not think that anyone else will do it.”
Peskov said that the director of prize-winning films such as The Return and Leviathan did not “have the right” to appeal to peace because he had never condemned the “massacre in the Donbas” – the alleged violence against Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine that Russian disinformation campaigns use as a pretext for justifying its military campaign.
In a response sent to Peskov on Tuesday morning, which has been seen by the Guardian, Zvyagintsev said it was true that he did not have a voice in the matter, but neither did “a hundred million Russian citizens”, because Putin had “never heard their voices”.
For the Kremlin to silence its critics with the counter-question, “But where have you been for the last eight years?”, Zvyagintsev said, was “hypocritical”. “The only thing that would have been right and rational”, he continued, “would have been to act according to the principle of hic et nunc – here and now: it would have been to put an end to this war as ruthless as it is senseless.”
The Kremlin has not responded to the film-maker’s message.
Zvyagintsev’s Cannes speech has also received some criticism from Ukraine, where commentators suggested it continued the “appeal to the tsar” tradition – in which Russian opposition figures begged authorities for change rather than demanding it – and put the lives of Russian soldiers on a par with Ukrainian civilians.
Minotaur, which premiered at Cannes to positive reviews, is the 62-year-old’s first film since he suffered a life-threatening Covid-19 infection and subsequently went into exile in France.
An adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 erotic thriller The Unfaithful Wife set in the fictional Russian city of Krasnoborsk, it follows a business executive (Dmitriy Mazurov) who is on the verge of laying off employees to be drafted into the Ukraine war effort when he discovers that his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is having an affair.