French actor Gérard Depardieu, a well-known admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a holder of a Russian passport, has shut down his Russian production center called PTS ZhD. The reason is a “pause in projects”, the step has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine, the Russian reported tax agency quoting the producer of the actor Arno Frilli.
According to Frilli, the center was to be used “to develop audiovisual projects, but without active activity, this system is useless, because it requires expenses even during downtime”. Frilli added that the new structure could be opened when more concrete data on some projects become known.
Last year the French actor announced he would make a film about the pilots of the Normandy Niemen squadron, the only French unit that fought against the Germans in Eastern Europe during WWII. However, Frilli has now said that work on the film has also stopped. “It’s a Russian-French project, after the crisis started, the French side withdrew from the project, but we still hope we can make it happen,” Frilli said.
French actor Gérard Depardieu has been among a number of Western celebrities who have become fans of the Russian president in recent years. In 2013, he accepted Russian citizenship and with it also gained the ability to pay significantly lower taxes. In an open letter, he called Russia a “great democracy” and at a film festival in Lithuania in 2014, already after the annexation of Crimea, he called Ukraine part of Russia. Ukraine then added him to the list of cultural figures threatening the country’s security.
However, at the end of March this year, Depardieu condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and called the Kremlin head’s decision to send the army to the neighboring country an “unacceptable and insane excess.”
