The Banishment

The Banishment (2008)

Изгнание

If you want to kill, kill. If you want to forgive, forgive.

While vacationing in the countryside at his childhood home, a woman suddenly reveals to her husband that she is expecting a child – but not his.

Date of release
2008-03-27
TMDB
7.1 / 10 (183)
Runtime
2h 38m
Genres
Drama
Director
Andrey Zvyagintsev

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $320K
  • Filmed in: Russia
  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

The Banishment is a 2007 Russian psychological drama film directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev. The film is a loose adaptation of The Laughing Matter, a 1953 novel by Armenian-American writer William Saroyan. It stars Konstantin Lavronenko and Maria Bonnevie.

Production

Director Andrey Zvyagintsev said the project took him nearly three years to complete, starting from when he first thought about the plot. The film's screenplay was presented to Zvyagintsev by Artyom Melkumian, an Armenian friend of his who worked as a television cameraman. Melkumian loved William Saroyan's The Laughing Matter and spent ten years adapting the novel.

Zvyagintsev said "The entire success of the film depends on the cast. So I spend a long time finding exactly the right people. I always have an image of a particular character in mind, and then audition many actors and keep comparing the essence of the character with the essence of the people I meet.

The film had 103 shooting days in four different countries—France, Belgium, Moldova and Russia. The city exterior scenes were filmed in historically industrial towns of Belgium and northern France: Charleroi, Roubaix and Tourcoing. The house, the railway station, the church, the cemetery and the wooden bridge next to the house were purposefully built on location near Cahul, Moldova.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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