Kirill Serebrennikov, the prominent Russian director of film and theater, has had his widely-condemned fraud sentence commuted and has subsequently left the country.
On Monday, a Moscow court moved to cancel the three-year prison sentence and erase his criminal record after half of the term had passed without any parole violations, according to local reports. His travel ban has also been lifted.
A picture of Serebrennikov sporting an “I turn the TV off” t-shirt was then posted to social media on Tuesday, purportedly showing he had arrived in France after leaving Russia.
Deadline sources have confirmed that he is now in Germany where he is working on film and theater projects. It is unlikely that he will be returning to Russia any time soon, though the decision is not set in stone permanently.
Last year, Serebrennikov was unable to attend the Cannes premiere of his film Petrov’s Flu due to the travel ban. Deadline spoke to the filmmaker ahead of the premiere to discuss his legal issues.
The charges stemmed back to Serebrennikov’s role as the artistic director of the Gogol Center in Moscow, which he turned into a prominent cultural center. It was claimed that him and four other defendants had embezzled a significant amount of funding, which was denied by the director. The charges were widely condemned by international human rights and film orgs, but a Moscow court found him guilty nonetheless, handing him a suspended sentence, meaning he at least avoided jail time.
Serebrennikov, whose credits also include The Student and Leto, has multiple projects in various stages of production, including Tchaikovsky’s Wife, which could be headed to Cannes this year.