With just days away from the jam-packed Cannes Film Festival this year, the announcement of the screening of the film Mariupolis 2 comes as a surprising and heartbreaking tribute to the director Mantas Kvedaravicius who was killed in the Russian invasion of Mariupol in April. The film is a sequel to the wildly popular Mariupolis, which showed the day-to-day lives of citizens as the threat of war with Russia increased.
The film is a sad reminder of how the invasion was foreshadowed for years up to the climactic event earlier this year. As the director was working on a follow-up to the documentary, the invasion broke out, and he was sadly killed on April 2nd. The city itself is nigh destroyed by the marauding Russian military forces.
In a statement at the time, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said about the death of Mantas, “While [he was] trying to leave Mariupol, Russian occupiers killed Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravicius.”
Miraculously, his fiancé and co-director, Hanna Bilobrova, was able to bring back the footage and finish editing the film with Dounia Sichov. The film is set to screen on May 19th at Cannes in the Bunuel Theatre and on May 20th at the Agnes Varda Theatre.
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