© picture alliance / NurPhoto | Luca Carlino
Russian director Andrey Zviaguintsev won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday. In his acceptance speech, he called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop the war in Ukraine.
62-year-old Andrey Zviaguintsev won the prize (the festival's second most important award after the Golden Palm) for Minotaur, a political thriller about a wealthy Russian family during the early days of the invasion of Ukraine. It is the first film in nearly a decade by the director who has lived in France since the invasion of Ukraine. In 2021, he became seriously ill from a corona virus infection and spent more than a month in Moscow in an artificial coma.
In his acceptance speech, the director spoke of the war in Ukraine and the wish of millions of people on both sides of the front line: an end to the conflict that has already claimed so many lives. "The only person who can stop this massacre is the president of the Russian Federation," Zviaguintsev said. He addressed Putin directly: "End this massacre, the whole world is waiting for it."
The Golden Palm went to Fjord by Romanian Cristian Mungiu, a film about a conservative Romanian family in a remote Norwegian village suspected of mistreating their children.
Picture: © picture alliance / NurPhoto | Luca Carlino