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Ukrainian producer Julia Sinkevych, named main jury president at French TV festival Series Mania, is still hoping to come to Lille this week despite the ongoing war.

“Last night, there was bombing not far from Lviv, so you never know. [Producer] Dariusz Jabłoński and the Polish Film Academy are helping out Ukrainian filmmakers and they will pick me up when I am in Poland,” she tells Variety during a conversation interrupted by a siren.

“Usually, it means you have to hide. But I am so tired of it – it happens so often. So sometimes, I don’t.”

In the worst-case scenario, she will be watching competition titles online from a shelter, with French writer and director Marc Dugain appointed as vice-president. Sinkevych admits she is “scared and frightened” to leave Ukraine as she might not be able to return to her family, but is adamant about bringing more attention to what is happening in her country.

This is the Pure Movies review of A Gentle Creature, directed by Sergei Loznitsa, and starring Vasilina Makovtseva, Liya Akhedzhakova, Valeriu Andriutã and Boris Kamorzin. It’s difficult to write about A Gentle Creature. This is partly by design, of course, with writer/director Sergei Loznitsa refashioning a Dostoyevsky short story into a sprawling, elusive, beguiling epic. What quickly becomes apparent during Loznitsa’s two-and-a-half-hour opus is that it’s a film of ravishing ambition, mounting a complex allegory for life in modern Russia that confounds narrative sense at every turn. In its place is an intricate framework of signs and signifiers, vignettes of dreamlike absurdity that flow with hazy indifference towards somewhere, well, let’s just say ‘bleak’.