Kirill Serebrennikov

Origins and early life

Kirill Serebrennikov was born in Rostov-on-Don on 7 September 1969 to Semyon Mikhailovich Serebrennikov, a Jewish surgeon, and Iryna Oleksandrivna Lytvyn, a Ukrainian teacher of Russian; his Jewish descent through his father is reported by the Russian and the Jewish press alike, and this fiche notes plainly that he was not raised in the Jewish religion.

Work and career

He took a degree in physics at Rostov State University and came to directing without formal theatre training, moving to Moscow in 2001, where his stagings of contemporary drama made him the most talked-about director of his generation. In 2012 the Moscow authorities gave him a defunct municipal theatre, which he turned into the Gogol Center, the liveliest stage in Russia, open to new writing, to dance, to cinema and to audiences who had never set foot in a theatre.

In May 2017 his flat and the Gogol Center were raided; he was arrested that August and accused of embezzling state subsidies for a festival that the prosecution claimed had never taken place, although witnesses and press reviews established that it had. He spent almost two years under house arrest, directing rehearsals by written notes, and in 2020 received a three-year suspended sentence in a case that Russian and international artists, and much of the press, regarded as political.

He continued working throughout: Leto (Summer), on the Leningrad rock scene, was in competition at Cannes in 2018 while he was confined, Petrov's Flu followed in 2021 and Tchaikovsky's Wife in 2022. He left Russia in 2022, publicly condemned the invasion of Ukraine, and has since worked in Germany and France, staging opera and theatre in Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna and Zurich, and in 2024 presented The Disappearance of Josef Mengele at Cannes.