Culture

Accoladed director Andrey Zvyagintsev has sent a direct message to Vladimir Putin urging him to start listening to the Russian people and end the “senseless” war in Ukraine, continuing a war of words between Russia’s most revered living film-maker and the Kremlin that started at the Cannes film festival awards ceremony over the weekend.

Accepting the Grand Prix for his new film Minotaur on the French Riviera on Saturday night, Zvyagintsev had appealed to Putin to “stop this butchery […] the whole world is waiting for this.”

“My name is Marwan Abdelhamid,” he said. “Born in Jerusalem, raised in Gaza. Left it at seven and haven’t been back since. This is the story of so many Palestinians.” He sounded a little nervous, but it soon dissipated. On stage, he marshalled that same mischievous energy that runs through everything from his social media clips to his music videos. In between songs, he addressed the crowd, bringing it back to the fraught political moment, to Gaza. Often, he told them, he would be told: “Shhh, don’t talk about Palestine.” Often, he admitted, he asked himself how he could be singing and dancing when his people were dying. But joy in our culture was our right, he said.

Cumming says that the filming has been an intense experience because of the subject matter. “I have this sort of, I don’t know what it is, soreness in my heart, in my chest, when I think about it,” he says. But it’s left him feeling hopeful for the future after working alongside so many young people.

“They were so gorgeous and supportive and kind,” he says. “It’s very emotional.”

Despite the theme, the show also features a lot of uplifting solidarity and camaraderie, expressed through the younger workers who work at his bar. “Joy, queer joy, trans joy, Black joy is a form of protest”, says Cumming. “It infuriates people who don’t have joy or don’t understand why you can have joy when the world, everything seems to be against you.”

“There’s great joy [in Tip Toe].” What follows is a short pause: “Some of it.”