Kirill Serebrennikov on Fear, Solitude and Post-Soviet Life in Cannes Competition Title ‘Petrov’s Flu’

LONDON -- A British journalist and her publisher faced defamation claims in a London court on Wednesday from billionaire Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich and other wealthy Russians over a book about the rise of President Vladimir Putin.Catherine Belton’s book, “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West,” charts the rise to wealth and power of former KGB agent Putin and a circle of associates after the breakup of the Soviet Union.Abramovich says the book’s

Simone Biles' shocking withdrawal from the team gymnastics competition at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, her fellow athletes and famous fans are sending messages of support.The defending gold medalist in vault, floor exercise, all-around and the team competition, Biles left the competition floor with the Team USA medical trainer after her first rotation on the vault.

EXCLUSIVE: German actor August Diehl, whose credits include The Young Karl Marx, Inglourious Basterds and A Hidden Life, has signed on to play the lead role in big-budget Russian drama Woland.

Petrov’s Flu, directed by the dissident Russian film-maker Kirill Serebrennikov, who’s laying the chaos on thick and fast. I’m liking the movie but many others are not.

Watching the tumultuous and punishing Russian extravaganza Petrov’s Flu is like suffering a physical assault in a dark alley, or having a load of garbage jammed down your throat and piled on top of you until you just can’t take it anymore. Experimental theater bad boy and 2018 Cannes competition Leto entrant Kirill Serebrennikov takes a throw-in-everything-including-the-kitchen sink approach to painting an appallingly bleak portrait of modern Russian life.

Kira Kovalenko’s Russian drama Unclenching The Fists won the Grand Prize in Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar this year.

Christopher Vourlias Mubi, the London-based streamer and theatrical distributor that’s been on a buying spree this week in Cannes, has acquired the rights for North America, U.K., and a host of other territories for Kira Kovalenko’s “Unclenching the Fists,” which took home the top prize in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section, Variety can reveal.Set in a former mining town in Russia’s North Ossetia region, “Unclenching the Fists” is the story of a young woman, played by Milana

Guy Lodge Film CriticCANNES — At a banner ceremony for female filmmakers, Russian writer-director Kira Kovalenko’s sophomore feature “Unclenching the Fists” won the top prize for best film in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival this evening, from a jury headed by British filmmaker Andrea Arnold.

CANNES, France -- Celebrated Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov is banned from leaving his home country, so he is attending the Cannes Film Festival virtually. Serebrennikov phoned into the red-carpet premiere of his film, “Petrov's Flu,” by FaceTime and spoke to the media on Tuesday by Zoom.A seat was left open for the 51-year-old director when “Petrov's Flu” premiered Monday in Cannes.

Christopher Vourlias Kirill Serebrennikov made an appearance by FaceTime on Monday after the premiere of “Petrov’s Flu,” which bowed in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The 51-year-old helmer is banned from leaving Russia and was unable to attend the opening.“I would like to thank everyone who is here.

Guy Lodge Film CriticIt’s been two years since iconoclastic Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov was released from a 20-month period of house arrest on embezzlement charges widely considered to have been trumped up by the government. If things haven’t been plain sailing since then — the revived case ended in a suspended sentence last year, confining the director to his home country — he has at least been free to roam, work and film in Russia.

was truthfulness.

If you’ve ever fancied taking the train from Moscow to the far northwestern Russian city of Murmansk above the Arctic Circle, Compartment No. 6 (Hytti No. 6) will almost certainly cure you of the urge. At the same time, Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen’s second film, which is about such a journey, offers up vivid emotional twists and turns that are charted with unusual acuity, qualities that will propel it to a modest but well noted life on the festival circuit.

Jessica Kiang For anyone who’s ever got drunk on bad schnapps with a stranger, for anyone who’s ever been properly alone in a nowhere-town and spoken to a dial tone just to look like they had something to do, for anyone who’s ever been asked how to say “I love you” in their language and has patiently sounded out the words for “Fuck you” … Juho Kuosmanen’s deeply delightful Cannes competition title “Compartment No.

“Clara Sola” and a naturalistic one in the African film “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” and it’s even surfaced in Charlotte Gainsbourg’s documentary about her mother, Jane Birkin, “Jane by Charlotte,” in Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir Part II” and in Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World.”Of those films, most are by female directors.

Scarlett Johansson's original Avenger is finally having her story told, mining a decade's worth of Easter eggs — about Budapest, the Red Room and Dreykov's daughter — and introducing the family of Russian spies we never knew Natasha had: Her «mother,» former Widow and leading scientist Melina (Rachel Weisz); her «father,» the super-soldier Red Guardian (David Harbour) and her little «sister,» the assassin Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh).

He may be barred from leaving Russia and thus unable to travel to Cannes, but arthouse cinema favorite Kirill Serebrennikov is refusing to let that dampen his spirit ahead of the premiere of his latest movie, Petrov’s Flu, in the French fest’s Competition.