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Moscow’s Hype Film, whose credits include Mona Fastvold’s Venice Competition contender The World To Come and Kirill Serebrennikov’s buzzy Petrov’s Flu (sold by Charades), is lining up a project exploring the lives of contemporary Russians with disabilities.

The Carpenter is to be directed by Avdotya (Dunya) Smirnova, whose previous filmmaker credits include Two Days (2011) starring Fedor Bondarchuk, and Andrei Konchalovsky’s 2007 comedy drama Gloss, which she co-wrote.

Smirnova’s drama will look at the experiences of parents who make huge sacrifices to give their disabled child a comfortable life.

Smirnova co-wrote the screenplay with novelist/screenwriter Marina Stepnova.

The late Claude Brasseur as an elderly curmudgeon in The Student And Mr Henri (L'étudiante Et Monsieur Henri) who lets out a room in his large apartment rent-free to a young student, under one condition: she must do everything she can to ruin his son’s impending marriage Photo: Unifrance

Claude Brasseur, the French actor who came from a long family tradition in the profession, has died in Paris at the age of 84.

Brasseur was the son of actor Pierre Brasseur and the actress and scriptwriter Odette Joyeux. His great-grandfather Jules Brasseur was the founder of the Théâtre des Nouveautés in Paris.

Claude Brasseur was the son of an acting family Photo: Unifrance Despite his background, Brasseur did not immediately think of going on the stage, preferring instead the idea of becoming a journalist. Once he had taken to the stage in 1954 and made his first film, Rue De Paris...

The upcoming films by Julia Ducournau, Alain Guiraudie and Lav Diaz will also be co-produced by the Franco-German channel. Arte France Cinéma’s (managed by Olivier Père) third selection committee of 2019 has decided to get involved in the co-production and pre-purchasing of four projects. Standing out among them is Petrov, which will be the 8th feature film from Kirill Serebrennikov after Leto (The Summer) (in competition in Cannes in 2018), The Student, Izmena (in competition in Venice in 2012), Yurev den (in competition in Locarno in 2008), Playing the Victim (winner in Rome in 2006) and Ragin (East of the West at Karlovy Vary in 2005). This time, the filmmaker will be adapting a novel by Alexeï Salnikov and the film will follow a day in the life of a comic book artist and his family, in...

Kirill Serebrennikov's Leto (2018) is having its exclusive online premiere on Mubi in the United Kingdom. It is showing from August 16 - September 14, 2019.A constrained, silenced audience claps along to electric guitars and drums that produce distinctively rock and roll tunes. Young men only dare to tap rhythmically with their toes, while the one attempt for fangirls to lift up a love-heart poster is hushed in seconds. As the camera glides past the band into the audience, the lead raises his voice only slightly to deliver the chorus finale: “You’re trash!” Amidst the loud bangs on cymbals and the bass riffs, something both cynical and liberating is taking form on stage: a chronotope, a lifestyle, Soviet rock and roll, a love story. In Leto fact meets fiction in reconstructing a time (1980s) and space (Leningrad) in a nostalgic manner, to tell the story of Russian idol Viktor Tsoi and...

Leningrad, the early 1980s: the Soviet Union’s stranglehold on its citizens continues, glasnost is not even a glimmer in Gorbachev’s eye and it feels as if the Party will never end. The one thing that does seem to be thriving, however, is the city’s underground rock scene, albeit one with a crowd stifled by authoritarian apparatchiks. (A fan tries to hold up a homemade sign for her favorite rock band. A man in a suit shuts down this oh-so-revolutionary action down Asap.) The applause-ometer may never allowed...

Leto pays tribute to the early years of Russian rock. In a new clip from the film, a new take on Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" is presented, while cast members on a bus take turns singing the lines. There's subtle touches of animation and an awkward feeling that is tough to escape. Avant-garde Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov has truly crafted something original here and it needs to be seen to be completely understood.

Kirill Serebrennikov (The Student) returns to the big-screen with Leto, which is a tribute to the early years of Russian rock. The movie takes place in Leningrad, in the summer, during the early eighties. Smuggling LP's by Lou Reed and David Bowie, the underground rock scene is boiling ahead of the Perestroika. Mike and his beautiful wife Natasha meet with young Viktor Tsoi. Together with friends, they will change the trajectory of rock n' roll music in the Soviet Union.

While we gear up for Cannes Film Festival (see our most-anticipated films here), a few of last year’s premieres are still looking for a U.S. release. One that recently got picked up was the Soviet-set rock ‘n’ roll drama Leto, from controversial director Kirill Serebrennikov, who was under house arrest in Moscow due to being accused of embezzling $2 million of government funds. His 80s-set counterculture film, acquired by Gunpowder & Sky, will get a release next month and now the U.S. trailer and poster have arrived.

Ed Frankl said in our review, “At a time when freedom of expression titters on the brink in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, there’s something thrillingly contemporary about Kirill Serebrennikov’s Soviet-set musical drama. Early 1980s St. Petersburg proves a breeding ground of underground music as rebellion, however tacit, emerges in home-grown rock and punk. Leto’s melancholic ode to rough-and-ready...

Near the end of shooting “Leto,” his followup to breakout drama “The Student,” Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov was arrested, charged with embezzling $2 million in state funds from a Moscow-area avant-garde theater he runs, and ultimately placed under house arrest pending trial. Serebrennikov still finished the film, which was then accepted into Cannes’ Competition section, where it screened last May without its filmmaker in attendance.

That Serebrennikov’s arrest — he was just freed mere weeks ago, and is pushing for a full acquittal — came at the hands of a government that isn’t too hip to his outspoken anti-Kremlin views should give anyone pause as to its motivations, as should the content of the film he was making when the hammer came down on him. As with much of Serebrennikov’s work, it’s a film that makes plenty of veiled jabs at modern Russian life under Vladimir Putin’s rule,...

Filmmakers working in the rock music realm often have a fine needle to thread: When portraying a world of self-indulgence, how closely can they enter into the spirit of things before becoming self-indulgent themselves? In “Leto,” his sprawling, chaotically shaped ode to the underground Leningrad rock scene of the 1980s, gifted Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov only sporadically finds the sweet spot, landing on stray moments of both human tenderness and musical euphoria in a bemusing blizzard of assorted characters, styles and songs that often tips over into outright kitsch. Embellishing with numerous fictional details the true story of influential, tragically short-lived Soviet singer-songwriter Viktor Tsoi, “Leto” happily avoids the bland structural pitfalls of the musical biopic, but also provides outsiders with few entry points to its rather niche milieu. The scene is the star here, and Serebrennikov is more concerned that we experience it than understand it.

That conflicting blend...

Russian films at Cannes this year illustrate bravery, past glories and increasing success in genres that show off the country’s forte in FX and animation work.

As Ilya Stewart of Hype Production sees it, the most successful Russian output these days in terms of critical and fest appreciation is outside the state film funding system, which shepherds most of the country’s films from development to distribution.

Hype’s rocker biopic “Leto” (“Summer”), a warts-and-all look at a seminal Russian music figure from the ’80s who was inspired by Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, has utilized independent financing and co-production resources from outside Russia, says Stewart, noting that the director remains under house arrest — a punishment recently extended so that he will not be able to attend the Cannes premiere of the main competition film.

“Our director, Kirill Serebrennikov, is truly a global citizen, who is extremely sensitive to...

On paper, this looks like a less than spectacular Cannes. Where are the stars? Where are the big names?

Just two of the 21 films in competition are American: Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” and David Robert Mitchell’s “Under the Silver Lake.” From the U.K., zero. Disney will bring “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” though it’s upstaging Cannes by holding the world premiere five days earlier in Hollywood. If you had to skip a year, this would be the time to do it, some have gone as far as to suggest.

I couldn’t disagree more. The fact that we don’t know what to expect from most of the films in competition makes this the most exciting lineup in ages — one with a genuine opportunity for discovery.

I’ve been attending Cannes since 2011. That’s how far you’d have to go back to find an edition with...

Variety has been given the exclusive first clip from Cannes competition film “Leto” (Summer), about real-life rock musician Viktor Tsoi. The film’s director, Kirill Serebrennikov, is under house arrest in Russia.

The producers are Ilya Stewart and Murad Osmann, who have been selected for Variety’s “10 Producers to Watch” program. The duo also produced Serebrennikov’s drama about a teenage religious fanatic, “The Student,” which played in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard two years ago.

“Leto” follows the story of Viktor, Mike and his wife Natasha during one summer in the early 80s in Leningrad. But it also tells the story of the birth of the underground rock scene in the Soviet Union, about friendship, first love and freedom.

“Kirill Serebrennikov invites the viewer into the atmospheric, careless world of our heroes and the youth of the 80s, despite the constraints of the world around them. They dream of freedom,...