Andrey Zvyagintsev faced the Cannes press corps Tuesday for his competition entry Minotaur, his first film made entirely outside Russia, and argubly his most directly political work of his career.

Set in the fictional Russian city of Krasnoborsk in 2022 and shot entirely in Riga, Latvia, Minotaur follows a shipping company CEO (played by Dmitriy Mazurov), whose investigation into his wife’s infidelity (Iris Lebedeva) gradually gives way to a reckoning with state violence, conscription and moral collapse. Visually, the film renders its world — grim housing estates, empty streets, surveillance-era interiors — with the cold precision of a crime scene.

Zvyagintsev has lived in exile in France since suffering a near-fatal bout of COVID in 2020 that left him temporarily unable to move — a period that coincided almost exactly with Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Calling his return to Cannes one of “the best things that happened to me” over the past nine years, Zvyagintsev said that despite his time abroad, he was still intimately aware of the situation inside Russia. “I left Russia 6 years ago but I spent about 60 years in the country. I know a lot about corruption. I know what I am talking about.”

Given the “current Russian content,” Zvyagintsev said, with the ongoing war in Ukraine, mounting casualties on both sides and state-run propaganda dominating the airwaves, he felt it was “important to make this film…it was a perfect pretext to say some important things.”

But at the press conference, Zvyagintsev avoided overt political statements, arguing that “sometimes it is better to indulge in silence and rely on gestures.”

Zvyagintsev said he began thinking about the idea for the film, a loose adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife (1969) after making his 2017 feature Loveless, well before the full scale invasion of Ukraine. But the invasion, and Russia’s military mobilization of fighting-age men, began shortly after he started working on the script, leading him to include them in the story “to fill the gaps” in Chabrol’s film.

The director’s relationship with Russian cultural authorities has long been fraught. His Oscar-nominated Leviathan, which premiered in Cannes, winning best screenplay, received state funding, but it earned a sharp rebuke from then-culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, who later suggested the ministry had no plans to support Zvyagintsev’s future projects.