CANNES, France — Standing at the award podium at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday night, the Russian filmmaker Andrei Zvyagintsev, who had just won the Grand Prix for “Minotaur,” his bleak critique of Russian life during the war in Ukraine, made a terse plea.
“Millions of people on both sides of the front line have only one dream — that the countless killings will finally stop,” Zvyagintsev said. “And the only person who can bring this slaughter to an end is you, Mr. President of the Russian Federation. End this bloodbath. The whole world is waiting. Thank you all.”
Zvyagintsev’s appeal to Vladimir Putin was clearly a rebuke of the Russian leader’s war, and it drew robust applause from the glitzy audience on the French Riviera. But in Ukraine, it elicited ridicule, frustration and eye-rolling.
On his influential Facebook page, Mustafa Nayyem, a Ukrainian former journalist and ex-member of parliament who helped start the Maidan Revolution in 2013, accused the Russian film director of portraying Russians and Ukrainians as equal victims of the war, and of voicing little more than a meek “petition to the czar” — Putin.
“What first shocked me was the cynical formula of ‘both sides of the front line’ — which effectively transforms Russia’s war against Ukraine into a symmetrical human tragedy with no clearly named aggressor,” Nayyem wrote. “Friends, good Russians — are you in your right minds? What do you mean, both sides?”
Writing in the New Voice of Ukraine newspaper, the screenwriter Andrii Kokotyuha said Ukrainians in the cultural sector were widely mocking Zvyagintsev as another docile Russian artist making perfunctory pleas for peace while collecting laurels at red-carpet festivals in the West.
The harsh reactions in Ukraine reflect the deep-seated rage felt by many in a country that was invaded by Russia more than four years ago and who believe Russians — even war critics like Zvyagintsev — bear collective responsibility.
Time and again on the international stage, many Ukrainians say, Russian intellectuals, artists, and even dissidents cop out by blaming Putin or the government for the war but never the Russian people who allow Putin’s regime to continue.
What’s more, many commentators noted, much of the Ukrainian fury stemmed from the timing of Zvyagintsev’s award and his short speech. It came on the same night that Russia pounded Kyiv with hundreds of drones and missiles, including a nuclear-capable hypersonic, in one of the heaviest barrages of the war that killed four people.
After “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” a documentary critical of Russian pro-war propaganda and the indoctrination of schoolchildren, won the Oscar this year, many Ukrainians criticized the film for promoting the trope of a helpless “good Russian” who resists the government through small acts.
In Ukraine, “at the beginning of the war there was the belief that if Russians started to resist, even if many of them would be arrested, it would fill Russian prisons and they could fight against this regime,” said Tetyana Filevska, the creative director of the Ukrainian Institute, a government-affiliated arts body in Kyiv, who described herself as a one-time fan of Zvyagintsev.
“But seeing how little this resistance is, how weak it is, we just feel there is no will,” Filevska said. She raised the example of the Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov, who has been hailed as a dissident but has also called for Western sanctions to be lifted against Russian oligarchs.
Russian liberals, Filevska said, “want to have a better version of the imperial Russia, but they don’t want imperial Russia to be defeated.”
The furor around Zvyagintsev, who has criticized Putin’s attacks on Ukraine since 2014 and now lives in self-imposed exile in France, was a reminder of the polarizing landscape facing opposition-minded Russians: denounced by some for not speaking out enough; by others, for speaking at all.
Asked by journalists on Monday whether Putin had been informed of the 62-year-old director’s speech, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed Zvyagintsev as someone who “has no right to speak” because he “never condemned the bloody slaughter” of Russian-speaking residents of Donbas, the region in eastern Ukraine that Russia aims to seize. Putin and the Kremlin have long made false claims of genocide in Donbas to justify the war.
Putin’s pro-war supporters flooded social media to lambast Zvyagintsev as a “Judas” who “collected his thirty pieces of silver in Cannes.” One lawmaker called for his investigation or designation as a foreign agent. Another poster dismissed him as a “cut-rate Tarkovsky wannabe,” a reference to the acclaimed Soviet-era filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.
While many Russian state news agencies reported on Zvyagintsev’s Grand Prix award — second only to the Palme d’Or and the biggest win by a Russian director at Cannes since 1994 — they skipped over his anti-war remarks. Channel One, the influential pro-Putin mouthpiece, made no mention of Zvyagintsev at all.
After Peskov’s remarks, Zvyagintsev told independent Russian media outlet Meduza that it is true he had no right to speak, “just as hundreds of millions of Russians have no such right today.”
He was not asked about the criticism of him emerging from Ukraine and maintained the line — echoed in “Minotaur,” his new crime thriller about a provincial businessman who faces the moral dilemma of choosing men to send to the front in Ukraine — that the Russian government was leading the country toward “nothing but grief and tears; nothing but disappointment and deadening apathy; nothing but the severed limbs of your fellow citizens sacrificed in the name of a phantom goal.”
But for Nayyem, the former journalist, Zvyagintsev’s condemnation of the war wasn’t enough.
Zvyagintsev and other Russians continue to shirk responsibility and rarely speak of Ukrainian suffering, Nayyem said in an interview with The Washington Post, while adding that he did not oppose giving a Russian director an award or showing Russian works in the international cultural circuit solely because of their country of origin.
“Ukrainians are victims of aggression, not some abstract side in a line of contact, and Russian society can no longer hide behind the formula that everything is decided solely by Vladimir Putin,” Nayyem said. “He should have addressed not only the Kremlin, but Russians themselves — the elites, the cultural sphere, the army, officials, propagandists, those who remain silent, justify, fear, or adapt. He should have told them that the war continues not only because one ruler wants it to continue, but also because millions of people agreed to live within this lie.”
Feted by the Russian intelligentsia as the Tarkovsky of his generation, Zvyagintsev has long depicted Putin’s Russia as a country of endemic corruption, suffocating authoritarianism, moral decay and crime without punishment. After Zvyagintsev released “Leviathan,” perhaps his best-known film to date, in 2014, Russia’s Ministry of Culture, which partly financed the movie, criticized him for “openly spitting on” the government.
In “Minotaur,” which was filmed outside Russia and received no Russian funding, Zvyagintsev included details such as a shot of graffiti that reads “F— your war,” but little else in terms of explicit political messaging.
During the promotion of the film around Cannes in recent weeks, the director said that although he was personally “ashamed” of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, his film was not meant to be political, nor did he want to make overt political statements.
“Sometimes it is better to indulge in silence and rely on gestures,” he told reporters.
Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.
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