Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, in April 2021 in Moscow – Mikhail Tereshchenko / TASS / Sipa U
He is deprived of Croisette. Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, whose new film Petrov’s Flu will compete in Cannes, is prohibited from leaving Russian territory and will therefore not be able to legally go to the festival, his lawyer said on Monday.
This ban would be in effect until the end of the suspension of the prison sentence to which his client was sentenced, i.e. until June 2023.
A wave of international support
The 51-year-old artist was sentenced in 2020 to a three-year suspended prison sentence and a fine in a case of embezzlement of public subsidies that he contests. In August 2017, he was arrested and then placed under house arrest for more than a year and a half, accused with associates of having embezzled around 1.8 million euros between 2011 and 2014.
For his supporters, the director and director has in fact been punished for his sometimes daring works mixing sexuality – including homosexuality -, politics and religion, while the Kremlin defends a return to “traditional values”. The lawsuits sparked international support for Kirill Serebrennikov.
His film selected at Cannes this year is an adaptation of a novel by Russian writer Alexeï Salnikov, in which the sad daily life of a family from Yekaterinburg, an industrial city in the Urals, takes a surreal turn when his three limbs contract the flu. The feature film is due out in Russia on September 9.