‘Minotaur’ as an act of art against the war: Zvyagintsev on France’s Oscar 2027 submission

Exiled Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev sees his film ‘Minotaur’ — this year’s Grand Prix winner at the Cannes Film Festival and France’s official submission for the 2027 Oscars — as his artistic act against Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, as Reuters reports in an interview published on October 3.

The film is a drama about military recruitment and moral compromise: the protagonist Gleb, the owner of a logistics company, tries to save his workers after the town’s mayor asks him to identify 14 employees for military service; he recruits young drivers with promises of high pay, only to send them straight into the war. One scene shows Russian recruits boarding a bus for the front — a father saying goodbye to his teenage son, while another recruit’s mother screams in grief.

“For a director who has lived there, was born there and speaks only Russian… how could he not speak about the main, if not the most important, event of recent years?” Zvyagintsev says in the interview. The 62-year-old director, internationally known for ‘Leviathan’ and ‘Loveless’ — both Oscar-nominated — is sceptical that the film can change minds in Russia, where support for the war remains above 70 percent according to Levada Center polls. “Propaganda is like a heavy hammer, like pincers, like an anvil. It is a very blunt instrument,” he says. “Art, on the other hand, deals in nuance. This soft power works in the long term.”

The film, a French production in the Russian language, was shot in a Latvian town, because Zvyagintsev cannot return to Russia — he has lived in France since 2021, months before the full-scale invasion began. Its subject makes an official release of the film in Russia impossible, and in August Moscow declared the director a “foreign agent”. Critics have called ‘Minotaur’ his most direct political comment yet on Russia’s moral state.

The film opens in French cinemas on October 14, while the race for the 2027 Oscars continues — the 99th Academy Awards ceremony takes place on March 14, 2027.