Russian film-maker speaks against censorship

Andrei Zvyagintsev feels Kremlin govt strangling arts by limiting funds

MOSCOW: Oscar-nominated director Andrei Zvyagintsev on Thursday launched a furious attack on the Kremlin over government censorship that he said is strangling the arts. “It’s completely obvious that censorship has fully entered into the cultural life of the country,” Zyagintsev posted on the website of the Kommersant daily.

Zvyagintsev, whose biting social drama, Leviathan, was nominated for an Oscar last year, argued that the state effectively censors the arts by limiting funding for only projects it approves. The director said he was responding to comments by President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov that while censorship is unacceptable, the commissioning of arts projects made with state funds does not fall under this category.

“We say its censorship, they say it’s a state commission,” Zyagintsev wrote, saying that cinema and other arts are dependent on state funding to survive.

Leviathan was made with funding from the Russian culture ministry, but Minister Vladimir Medinsky said he disliked it. For Russian screenings, all the profound language had to be beeped out under a new law. “State officials give the author a topic and control its ‘correct’ embodiment in art,” Zvyagintsev said, calling the result “a talentless miserable lie.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 29^th, 2016.

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