The latest film by Russian Kiril Serébrennikov, “The Petrovs with the Flu”, filmed in 2020 while he was on trial for corruption, will be presented at the Cannes Film Festival, the production company reported today.
“I am glad that the Cannes public can see a film so important to me,” Serébrennikov said, quoted in the Sony Pictures Productions and Releasing Russia (SPP) statement.
In January 2020, the film’s production company reported on the end of filming, which took place on many occasions between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. due to court hearings.
Serébrennikov was sentenced in June last year to a three-year suspended sentence after being found guilty of embezzling public funds worth 129 million rubles (almost 1.7 million euros).
The theater director always defended his innocence and denounced a campaign of political persecution against him, although he admitted irregularities in the accounting of Plataforma, a cultural project devised ten years ago and aimed at the popularization and development of modern art, with which he said he had no nothing to see.
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According to the director, this film is an attempt to present Russia “through empathy” through a story “about childhood, fears, joys, love and hate, fury and devotion, loneliness and dreams ”.
“I wanted this film to have a lot of sensitivity, a lot of love. I did not intend to make this film, she came alone to me, enslaved me, and I gave myself with great pleasure to this captivity “, he commented.
The theater director also recalled that this process took place “at a very difficult time in my life and it was my main breath of fresh air, my main joy, and in a way, my lifeline.”
“So he is absolutely sincere and honest,” he said.
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The film is based on the novel The Petrovs with the flu and how much it surrounds them, by Alexei Salnikov, published in 2016 and which was then considered the book of the year in Russia.
Serébrennikov himself, famous for his theatrical pieces and who has already shot tapes like “The student” or “Summer”, adapted the script for this Russian, French, German and Swiss production.
The novel tells the story of a Russian sheet metal worker, surnamed Petrov, and his family, while they are all sick with the flu.
During the judicial process against him, France decorated him with the medal of the Order of Arts and Letters, and the Cannes and San Sebastián festivals programmed his film “Summer” about the life of the legendary Soviet rocker Victor Tsoi.
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