France Selects Russian-Language Cannes Winner Minotaur As Oscar Entry

France has chosen Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur to represent the country in the international feature film race at the Oscars, in spite of the filmmaker and cast being Russian. Minotaur triumphed over a shortlist that included Antonin Baudry’s historical biopic De Gaulle: Tilting Iron, Louis Clichy’s animated feature Iron Boy, Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva and Arthur Harari’s The Unknown. Zvyagintsev holds two prior Oscar nominations for his films, Leviathan (2014) and Loveless (2017).

Minotaur's arch rival at the Oscars 2027 will be Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi's Cannes Best Director winner, La Bola Negra, the official entry of Spain.

Minotaur Details

Minotaur celebrated its world premiere in Cannes this year where it won the Grand Prix, and has also been selected since for Telluride, Toronto, New York and BFI London Film Festival among a ton of other film festivals.

An official synopsis for Minotaur states, "Russia, 2022. When Gleb, a successful company director, finds himself under siege from mounting corporate pressures and an increasingly unstable world, the collapse of his carefully ordered life accelerates toward violence."

Minotaur Emerges France's Oscar Pick

A dissident Russian filmmaker, Zvyagintsev has been living in France with asylum status, while the film was largely financed and produced out of France by Charles Gillibert’s CG Cinema and MK2 Films. There was no chance that Russia would submit it as Oscar entry— especially after Zvyagintsev used his Cannes acceptance speech to call on Putin to end the war. Its other coproducing countries picked other films: Germany selected Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, while Latvia, a minority co-producer, chose Ulya. Everytime won the top prize at this year's Cannes Un Certain Regard, where Ulya also competed.

The selection of Minotaur marks the second year in a row that France went with a dissident filmmaker. Lat year, the country chose Iran’s Jafar Panahi, and his Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident over Richard Linklater’s French-language Nouvelle Vague. There was backlash from some quarters of the French film industry that questioned whether a country should be represented by a foreign filmmaker working largely in a language other than French.

The selection committee that chose Minotaur was presided over by critic and former Cannes Critics’ Week artistic director Charles Tesson. Minotaur stars Dmitriy Mazurov, Iris Lebedeva, Boris Kudrin, Yuriy Zavalnyouk, Varvara Zmykova, and Vladimir Friedman. France has not won the international feature prize since Régis Wargnier’s Indochine in 1993, though it has had a slew of nominations over the past 33 years.

Mubi will release Minotaur in U.S. theaters on November 20, 2026.