Andreï Zvyagintsev (Minotaur): “My native land, my own territory, is cinema”

Grand Prix at Cannes and now France’s representative at the Oscars, Minotaure allows the Russian director to reinvent Chabrol in the Russia of 2022. He films the homeland he left as a mental and political territory, haunted by Putin’s war. Meeting with a filmmaker lost in the middle of limbo.

On May 23, 2026, on the stage of the Grand Théâtre Lumière, Andreï Zviaguintsev received the Grand Prize of the 79th Cannes Film Festival. Nine years after the Jury Prize for lack of lovethe Russian filmmaker Leviathan returns to the charts with Minotaur.

All his cinema is there, well in its place: the great form, the family cut-out, the disillusioned reflections of the world, the overpowering frames and the mixture of twisted realism and crazy mythology. The director walks decisively onto the stage but instead of thanking the jury, he addresses someone who is absent. To Vladimir Putin, in Russian, in front of a room that holds its breath. “Millions of people on both sides of the front line dream of only one thing: for the massacres to finally stop. And the only person who can put an end to this butchery is the President of the Russian Federation. Put an end to this carnage. The whole world is waiting for this.”

A few months later, sitting across from us, Zvyagintsev still doesn’t blink: “I knew the risks. I never thought, neither before nor after my speech, that I would be able to return to Russia. It was clear from the beginning: I absolutely do not want to be associated with what this country is doing to Ukraine.” And it is precisely this Russia that we are talking about Minotaur. The film takes up the skeleton of The Unfaithful Wife by Claude Chabrol (the husband, wife and lover with murder on the horizon) to transpose it into the Russia of 2022. The husband, Gleb, is a business manager. When he discovers his wife’s adultery, partial mobilization is decreed and he is asked to designate among his employees the men who will go to the front. Chabrol’s marital drama finds itself contaminated by the war.

And here is the paradox. Zvyagintsev, who has known for several years that he wants nothing to do with Putin’s Russia, has just passed…