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After a trio of controversy-courting biographies, Russian auteur Kirill Serebrennikov will next tackle a more genteel original drama about photography shot and set in France.
Described as a “chamber film” and “almost a love story” cast on a more intimate scale, the project will be Serebrennikov’s first-ever French language feature.
Following 2022’s “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” with the one-two punch of “Limonov: The Ballad” and the upcoming Josef Mengele drama “The Disappearance” – which the filmmaker has already wrapped – Serebrennikov starting developing this French-language project to allow himself a welcome change of pace.
“It will be less dark,” he tells Variety from the Marrakech Film Festival, adding that he’s taking a break from real-world figures for a while. “Let’s say this original script is about my admiration for photography, about the genius of photography as an art [and about] the love of two photographers.”
Popular on Variety The filmmaker will shoot this smaller scale feature as he continues to develop his English-language, limited-series adaptation of “The Phantom of the Opera” with partners at Pathé and Hype Studios.
And while the director and playwright has always divided his attention between film and theater, Serebrennikov is equally keen to try his hand at new media, adding that he’s is “dreaming” of making a VR or AR project, and that he “loves it a lot.”
“It’s pure cinema—cinema without cuts,” he says. “That’s why I strive to show the audience that there are no tricks. Life is real, and we’re just presenting reality as it is, without hidden tools, without pretending, or showing only one side of it. [I’d really love to show] a 360-degree observation of this reality.”
Now based in Berlin, the Russian filmmaker has also become a fixture in Cannes, sending his past five films to the Croisette even as legal troubles prevented him from attending a number of those screenings in person. But the director was on-hand this past May to present “Limonov: The Ballad” alongside lead actor Ben Whishaw, and he could return next year to launch the Mengele-on-the-lam drama “The Disappearance.”
“This character is even worse,” the filmmaker says. “Once again I’m choosing to portray a very bad guy, but I think that’s important because if we don’t understand what evil is and what it means for us today, we will never be able to rid ourselves of it.”
“If we called Limonov ‘the Russian Joker,’ Mengele is an almost gothic figure who embodies all the dark sides of humanity,” Serebrennikov adds. “He’s completely inhuman, yet at the same time, he speaks for himself, with all that he expresses in the film now suddenly, and frighteningly, becoming part of our everyday lives.”
