Andrey Zvyagintsev's 'Minotauro' Premieres at Cannes 79

Andrey Zvyagintsev's new film 'Minotauro' premiered at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, marking his return nine years after 'Loveless' and following a severe COVID-19 hospitalization. The exiled Russian director, now based in France, shot the film in Latvia. Loosely inspired by Claude Chabrol's 'La femme infidèle' (1969), Zvyagintsev transforms the bourgeois marital drama into a broader dissection of power structures in contemporary Russia. The protagonist Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) owns a transport company and is married to Galina (Iris Lebedeva), who is having an affair with young photographer Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk). Their son Seryozha (Boris Kudrin) is heir to a world built on privilege and structural violence. The Ukraine war is a constant presence through forced recruitment and corruption; the title references the Greek myth where Athens sacrificed fourteen youths to the Minotaur, mirrored when the municipality demands fourteen recruits from Gleb's company. Gleb manipulates the system to avoid sacrificing his own workers. The film features cinematography by Mikhail Krichman, Zvyagintsev's regular collaborator, and a script co-written with Simon Lyashenko. Zvyagintsev previously won Best Actor for 'The Return' (2007), Best Screenplay for 'Leviathan' (2014), and the Jury Prize for 'Loveless' (2017) at Cannes.