Petrov's Flu

A riveting adaptation of Alexey Salnikov’s “Gripperoman” by the Russian star director Kirill Serebrennikov, who now lives in exile in Germany: A family plagued by the flu in post-Soviet Russia lives out its ordinary days with extraordinary secrets: The husband is a plumber who transforms everyday moments into wonderfully strange Japanese comics. His wife, a librarian, has a penchant for killing abusive men with a kitchen knife. The estranged parents continue to go about their daily routines in a feverish delirium, while the temporal and spatial boundaries between fantasy and reality increasingly blur. With “Petrov Has a Fever,” Serebrennikov was invited to compete for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for the second time, following “Leto.” In October 2025, his highly acclaimed feature film “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele,” starring August Diehl in the lead role, opened in German theaters. For years, Serebrennikov found his artistic work and (homo)sexual identity restricted and persecuted in Russia. After serving a period of house arrest, he took a clear stand against Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Since April 2022, the successful theater, film, and opera director has been living in exile in Germany, primarily in Berlin, and has since been working internationally, including at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Stuttgart State Opera, and various European stages. (Source: Wikipedia) "A profound cinematic journey into a nightmarishly distorted Russian society, in which a dysfunctional family is swept up in the frenzy of a worldview gone haywire. The intense, gripping images rush through scenes marked by dirty and repulsive details and, in their ruthlessness, can be understood as a sweeping indictment of a country in the throes of implosion. - Worth seeing" (Lexikon des Internationalen Films)