Acclaimed Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev urged President Vladimir Putin to end the \u201ccarnage\u201d in Ukraine on Saturday after his new movie set during the war came runner-up at the Cannes Film Festival.<\/p>\n
\u201cMillions of people on both sides of the line of contact now dream of only one thing: that the massacres finally stop,\u201d he said in his acceptance speech at the awards ceremony in Cannes.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd the only person who can put an end to this meat grinder is you… put a stop to this carnage, the whole world is waiting for this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zvyagintsev’s \u201cMinotaur\u201d was among the frontrunners for the Palme d’Or top prize for best film in Cannes, finishing with the second-place Grand Prix award behind \u201cFjord\u201d by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu.<\/p>\n
The first movie in nine years from the Russian director of \u201cLeviathan\u201d and \u201cLoveless\u201d is set against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.<\/p>\n
It focuses on a callous businessman who must deal with a marital crisis at the same time as requests from local officials to identify employees who can be enrolled in the army.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is absolutely awful for me to acknowledge what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Before you now, I can tell you that I am ashamed,\u201d he told reporters during a post-awards press conference.<\/p>\n
Zvyagintsev, who now lives in exile in France, told AFP this week that he did not expect his film to be released in his homeland but that many Russians would watch it on pirated copies or by using VPNs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Acclaimed Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev urged President Vladimir Putin to end the \u201ccarnage\u201d in Ukraine on Saturday after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[88,2695,9423],"class_list":["post-662751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-ukraine-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}