By Michaela Cabrera
PARIS, Oct 3 (Reuters) - Exiled Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev takes on Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine in "Minotaur", a drama about conscription and moral compromise released nearly five years after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion.
The film, which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival this year and is an entry for the 2027 Oscar for best international film, is released as debate persists over Russia's ability to sustain troop numbers in a conflict that has
left hundreds of thousands dead or wounded.
One scene shows Russian conscripts boarding a bus for the front, with a father saying goodbye to his teenage son, while the mother of another screams in anguish. Later, the image of an older recruit appears on a roadside billboard: he is dead and celebrated as a war hero.
The story centres on Gleb, the owner of a logistics company who is coming to grips with his wife having an affair, while being pressured by the local mayor to identify 14 employees for military service.
Unwilling to send his existing workers to the front, he recruits new drivers with promises of high salaries, only to dispatch them straight to the war.
"For a director who has lived there, was born there, and speaks only Russian ... how could he not talk about what has become the main, if not the most important, event of recent years?" Zvyagintsev said of himself in an interview with Reuters.
The 62-year-old director, best known internationally for "Leviathan" and "Loveless", both Oscar nominated, now lives in France, having left Russia in 2021, months before Moscow launched what it calls its special military operation in Ukraine.
PROPAGANDA VERSUS SOFT POWER
"Minotaur", produced in France, is in Russian but its topic means it will never be officially released in Russia. Zvyagintsev is sceptical anyway that it can shift opinion about the war. Support in Russia for the military campaign in Ukraine remained above 70% in 2026 polling by the Levada Center, although 67% of respondents also favoured peace negotiations.
"Propaganda is like a heavy hammer, like pliers, like an anvil. It's a very crude instrument," he said.
"Art, on the other hand, deals with subtleties. This soft power works over the long term."
Moscow has avoided another compulsory mobilisation since its politically damaging 2022 call-up, relying instead on recruitment drives and signing bonuses, though some analysts say a fresh mobilisation cannot be ruled out.
Videos of Russia's mobilisation campaigns posted online helped shape the screenplay, Zvyagintsev said. Unable to shoot in Russia, where he has not returned since suffering a severe bout of COVID-19 in 2021, he used a Latvian town as a stand-in.
"I don't think that after 60 years of life experience a person can suddenly lose touch with reality in just one year," he said.
Critics have described "Minotaur", which opens in French cinemas on October 14, as one of Zvyagintsev's most overt commentaries on Russia's political and moral condition.
"This is all we could do: tell the story as we see it and find the human being in this unbearable state of compromise," he said.
In August, Russia designated Zvyagintsev a "foreign agent", a label applied to public figures accused by authorities of carrying out anti-Russian activities with foreign support.
He declined to comment on what impact the designation might have on him personally or professionally.
FROM CHABROL TO UKRAINE
Zvyagintsev had originally sought to remake French director Claude Chabrol's 1969 thriller "La Femme Infidele" ("The Unfaithful Wife"), about a husband who suspects his wife is having an affair.
But when the rights were finally secured and work on the screenplay began in 2022, Russia's invasion of Ukraine transformed the project.
Chabrol's suburban Paris setting became a bleak Russian town, and the domestic tensions of the original story were recast against the backdrop of war.
"I realise now that we were simply lucky that in 2018-2019 we weren't able to acquire the rights," he said. "If we had made the film in 2018, it would have been completely different."
(Editing by John Irish and Susan Fenton)
