Biography
Kirill Semyonovich Serebrennikov was born on September 7, 1969, in Rostov-on-Don, then part of the Soviet Union. Although he had already staged amateur theater performances as a student, he initially studied physics in his hometown of Rostov, while remaining involved in his former school's amateur theater as its director. In 1998, he moved to Moscow, where he began directing at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre and later at the Bolshoi Theatre.
In 2012, together with graduates from his directing and acting class at the Moscow Art Theatre School, he founded The Seventh Studio. That same year, Serebrennikov was appointed Artistic Director of the avant-garde Gogol Center in Moscow.
He also directed productions at the Latvian National Theatre in Riga and at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. From 2012 onward, Serebrennikov began working in film as well.
From May 2017, Kirill Serebrennikov increasingly came under scrutiny from the Russian authorities. In August 2017, he was arrested on charges of alleged embezzlement, and his passport was confiscated—an event that triggered protests and expressions of solidarity from international artists, including Volker Schlöndorff, Elfriede Jelinek, and Nina Hoss. It is widely believed that, in Putin's homophobic Russia, Serebrennikov was also targeted because of his openly lived homosexuality. In 2020, a court sentenced him to a three-year suspended prison term for embezzlement.
During this period, Serebrennikov's feature film "Leto" ("Summer", 2018), about the early career of rock musician and poet Viktor Tsoi, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and received an award for its soundtrack. Three years later, his feature film "Petrov's Flu – Petrow hat Fieber" (RU/FR/CH/DE 2021) was also selected for the Cannes competition and received the CST Award for Best Cinematography.
However, his main focus remained on theater and opera. In October 2021, his play "Outside", created while under house arrest, was staged at Berlin's Schaubühne theater.
Since being granted permission to leave Russia in April 2022, Kirill Serebrennikov has lived in Berlin. In the years that followed, he directed productions at the Paris National Opera and the Salzburg Festival, among others.
His film "Tchaikovsky's Wife" (RU/FR/CH 2022) premiered in competition at Cannes in 2022. "Limonov: The Ballad" (IT/FR/ES 2024), a biopic of writer Eduard Limonov, and "Das Verschwinden des Josef Mengele" (DE/FR 2025), about the Nazi war criminal's flight to Argentina and Brazil, were also selected for Cannes.