Top film festivals, including Venice, are increasingly featuring work by Russian filmmakers even as the war in Ukraine continues into its fifth year, a shift that has reignited debate about whether cultural boycotts of Russia are eroding. The trend has proved contentious, most visibly around Ilya Khrzhanovsky's "DAU," which drew accusations from Ukrainian officials that its inclusion in Venice's main competition lent respectability to Putin's regime, though both the director and festival chief Alberto Barbera rejected claims of state backing or pro-Kremlin sympathies.

Many of the filmmakers now appearing at major festivals are Russian-born exiles who left the country either before or after the 2022 invasion, including Victor Kossakovsky, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Nastia Korkia, who have recently won prizes at Venice and Cannes. Figures such as Alexander Rodnyansky, sentenced in absentia to 8.5 years in prison by a Moscow court over his opposition to the war, describe a divide between the Russian state and a diaspora of dissenting artists now based across Europe and the US, some of whom, like Kantemir Balagov, are rebuilding their careers abroad with new international productions.