Last December, Kirill Serebrennikov started shooting his next film, “Limonov” (adapted from Emmanuel Carrère's classic novel) in Moscow, right before Russia's war in Ukraine. Then filming stopped and now that he's permanently moved to Berlin, the sets were rebuilt there to resume production.
Last April, searching for new info about the film, a reader of this site found the film’s page on distributor Pathé's website and, strangely enough, Ben Whishaw was listed in the cast. Not just that, but “Cold War” and “Ida” filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski was credited as the co-screenwriter (he was originally set to direct).
Now the film’s producer is telling Deadline that production is about to end on “Limonov”:
It all came together very naturally but again it was complex. We had been shooting for three weeks in Moscow and then there was the invasion. We had reconstructed New York in Moscow, so we had to lose the whole set and rebuild in Riga. We stopped for a few months and restarted in August and will be finished in the coming days
Serebrennikov has become a very big filmmaker in Europe. None of his films have really cracked the American market, or critical consensus, but that could change at this coming May’s Cannes as his latest one, titled “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” is set to premiere in competition.
“Tchaikovsky’s Wife” is Serebrennikov’s fourth straight film as a director at Cannes, his previous ones were “The Student,” “Leto,” and Petrov’s Flu.”
Add this to our Cannes 2023 predictions.