Cultural reaction against Russia for invasion intensifies, Hollywood leaves it without premieres

The cultural backlash against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified on Tuesday when the Cannes Film Festival said no Russian delegation would be welcome this year and the Venice Film Festival announced free screenings of a film about the 2014 conflict in eastern Ukraine. Donbas in Ukraine.

The announcements from Europe’s two major film festivals came on the heels of other prominent protests in the arts, including Hollywood’s decision to withdraw films set to premiere in Russia and the Munich Philharmonic’s decision to fire the chief conductor. Valery Gergiev.

The orchestra, along with other orchestras and festivals linked to Gergiev, cited the musician’s support for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his refusal to reject the invasion.

Cannes, which is scheduled for May, is the most global film festival and its international villa annually receives more than 80 countries from around the world.

In a statement, festival organizers said the ban on any official Russian delegations or people linked to the Kremlin would remain in place “unless the assault war ends in conditions that will satisfy the Ukrainian people”.

The festival did not rule out accepting films from Russia. In recent years, Cannes has shown films by filmmakers such as Kirill Serebrennikov, although the director has not been able to attend. Serebrennikov has a three-year travel ban after the Russian government accused him of embezzlement in a case that sparked protests among the Russian and European art community.

Hollywood continued to withdraw its films from Russian theaters. After Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros. and Sony announced they would stop distributing movies in Russia, including Warner’s highly anticipated “The Batman,” Paramount Pictures joined them on Tuesday. That includes upcoming releases like “Sonic the Hedgehog 2″ (“Sonic 2: The Movie”) and “The Lost City” (“The Lost City”).

Meanwhile, the Venice Film Festival said it was organizing free screenings of the film “Vidblysk” (“Reflection”), about the conflict in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, as a sign of solidarity with the Ukrainian people.

Screenings are scheduled for next week in Rome, Milan and Venice.

The film, which was presented in competition in Venice last year, tells the story of a Ukrainian surgeon imprisoned by Russia during the Donbas conflict in eastern Ukraine.

In 2014, Russia supported an insurgency in the mostly Russian-speaking region of eastern Ukraine known as Donbas, where Russian-backed rebels seized government buildings and proclaimed the creation of “people’s republics”.

“Vidblysk” shows the horrors of war, as well as the surgeon’s efforts to rebuild relationships after being released.

It was directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Valentyn Vasyanovych, whose 2019 film “Atlantis” was also set in eastern Ukraine and tackled similar themes of war and trauma. “Atlantis” won the best film award in the experimental Horizons section of the 2019 Venice Film Festival and was Ukraine’s nominee for the Oscars.

Earlier this week, the Venice Biennale art exhibition, of which the annual film festival is a part, announced that the Russian pavilion’s curator and artists had resigned to protest the war in Ukraine. .

Last week, the European Broadcasting Union announced that Russia would not be allowed to take part in an act for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which takes place in Turin in May.

The winner of the 2016 Eurovision contest was Ukrainian singer Jamala, who won with a song about the 1944 deportations of Crimean Tatars by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. On Tuesday, it became known that she had fled from Ukraine to Turkey with her two children.

Jamala, a Crimean Tatar, said in Istanbul that she never imagined she would end up sharing the same fate as her grandmother, whom she said “had only 15 minutes to pack” during the 1944 forced deportations.

The singer claimed that she left Kiev for Ternopil, in western Ukraine, where she thought her family would be safe, but decided to cross into Romania when she woke up to the sound of explosions there too. Her husband, like all men from 18 to 60 years old, remained in Ukraine.