While we gear up for Cannes Film Festival (see our most-anticipated films here), a few of last year’s premieres are still looking for a U.S. release. One that recently got picked up was the Soviet-set rock ‘n’ roll drama Leto, from controversial director Kirill Serebrennikov, who was under house arrest in Moscow due to being accused of embezzling $2 million of government funds. His 80s-set counterculture film, acquired by Gunpowder & Sky, will get a release next month and now the U.S. trailer and poster have arrived.
Ed Frankl said in our review, “At a time when freedom of expression titters on the brink in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, there’s something thrillingly contemporary about Kirill Serebrennikov’s Soviet-set musical drama. Early 1980s St. Petersburg proves a breeding ground of underground music as rebellion, however tacit, emerges in home-grown rock and punk. Leto’s melancholic ode to rough-and-ready counterculture proves ever more relevant as Serebrennikov, himself an avant-garde theater director, remains under house arrest in Moscow.”
See the trailer below for the film starring Teo Yoo, Irina Starshenbaum, and Roman Bilyk.
Avant-garde Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov (The Student) returns to the big-screen with a tribute to the early years of Russian rock. Leningrad, in the summer, early eighties. Smuggling LP’s by Lou Reed and David Bowie, the underground rock scene is boiling ahead of the Perestroika. Mike and his beautiful wife Natasha meet with young Viktor Tsoï. Together with friends, they will change the trajectory of rock n’roll music in the Soviet Union.
Leto opens on June 7 in NY and June 21 in LA.