By Andrew McCathie May 18, 2007, 15:57 GMT
Cannes, France - When a young Russian family arrive for a vacation in the countryside in Russian director Andrei Zviaguintsev's Izgnanie (The Banishment), it feels like they have found their way to the end of the world.
But speaking at press conference Friday following the premiere of Izgnanie at the Cannes Film Festival, Zviaguintsev insisted that the house where Max and Vera along with their two children stay was at the centre of the world.
'Because,' he said, 'everything begins again. It had to be at that point that everything had to be decided.'
Indeed in the city, where the family lives, there are distractions.
However, during the long hours of a vacation in the countryside, the relationship between Vera - played by Swedish-born actor Maria Bonnevie - and Alex by Russia's Konstantin Lavronenko starts to unravel after she tells him she is pregnant with someone else's child.
The 43-year-old Zviaguintsev's Izgnanie is one of 22 films competing for Cannes's top honours, the Palme d'Or.
Zviaguintsev, who was director of the critically acclaimed The Return released three years ago, is very much a part of the new generation of Russian filmmakers to emerge in recent years and have helped to underscore his the renaissance that has been under way in the nation's movie-making.
His debut film, The Return, scored two Golden Lions at Venice in 2003.
About 200 feature films are expected to be produced in Russia this year alone, with the nation also sending another film, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra, to the main competition in Cannes.
Alexandra is about a Russian grandmother who visits her grandson, a soldier stationed in the worn-torn Chechen republic.
The 56-year-old Sokurov is one of Russia's most prolific directors with 45 films in the last 29 years, is to make his fifth appearance in Cannes with Alexandra.
Traditionalists might worry that some of Russia's new wave of movie makers have sold out when compared to the greats of the nation's cinema's past, such as Tarkovsky and Sergei Bondarchuk.
But Zviaguintsev insists that his movie making has been influenced by some of the leading figures in Russian cinema history.
'They simply nourished me and helped me grow and allow me to become myself,' he said.
To tell his story in Izgnanie, Zviaguintsev draws on the stark contrast between a bleak urban post-industrial landscape, known simply as the city, and the undulating hills and almost banal beauty of summer in the Russian countryside.
Based on William Saroyan's The Laughing Matter, Alex tells Vera that the price for forgiveness is that the child is disposed of.
Alex's brother, Mark, a man with an unexplained dark past, arranges for an abortion, which appears to have gone wrong.
Zviaguintsev uses simple European names (Max, Vera and Mark), to communicate something of universal message in his movie about the desperation and loneliness that follows when partners grow apart. 'We are strangers,' Vera tells Max as the couple consider the consequences of her pregnancy.
But Izgnanie also has a distinctive Russian feel. 'I am a Russian director and I make Russian films,' said Zviaguintsev.
With a series of religious illusions, Izgnanie's slow pacing also means that at times it has something of a spiritual feel to. 'The film has a dream-like quality,' said Zviaguintsev.
'I am sure that one of the most important tasks of someone who makes films is make the invisible visible,' he said.
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