Screened as part of NZIFF 2017

Loveless 2017

Nelyubov

Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev

Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan) won the Cannes Jury Prize for his stark and gripping tale of a divorcing couple caught in a missing-child procedural.

Russia In Russian with English subtitles
128 minutes 4K DCP / CinemaScope

Rent

Producers

Alexandre Rodnyansky
,
Serguey Melkumov

Screenplay

Oleg Negin
,
Andrey Zvyagintsev

Photography

Mikhail Krichman

Editor

Anna Mass

Production designer

Andrey Ponkratov

Costume designer

Anna Bartuli

Music

Evgeni Galperin

With

Maryana Spivak (Zhenya)
,
Alexey Rozin (Boris)
,
Matvey Novikov (Alyosha)
,
Marina Vasilyeva (Masha)
,
Andris Keishs (Anton)
,
Alexey Fateev (the coordinator)

Festivals

Cannes (In Competition) 2017

Awards

Jury Prize
,
Cannes Film Festival 2017

Elsewhere

“Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev has produced another masterpiece in this apocalyptic study of a failed marriage and the subsequent disappearance of a child. Loveless is a stark, mysterious and terrifying story of spiritual catastrophe: a drama with the ostensible form of a procedural crime thriller. It has a hypnotic intensity and unbearable ambiguity which is maintained until the very end. This is a story of modern Russia whose people are at the mercy of implacable forces, a loveless world like a planet without the full means to support human life, a place where the ordinary need for survival has mutated or upgraded into an unending aspirational demand for status, money, freedom to find an advantageous second marriage which brings a nice apartment, sex, luxury and the social media prerogative of selfies and self-affirmation. But all of it is underpinned, or overseen, by intensely conservative social norms of Christianity, conformism and nationalism.” — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“After four films, including the brilliant Leviathan, we are almost prepared for the crystalline perfection of Russian genius Andrey Zvyagintsev’s style… There is no way to do the film justice while also selling it as an appealing way to spend two devastating hours. But Zvyaginstev’s skill as a filmmaker is such that as discomfiting as it is, it’s deeply compelling and immersive.” — Jessica Kiang, The Playlist