Annual Top Films Lists

Top 200 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2023: #124. Yuriy Bykov’s The Owner

yury_bykov

Top 200 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2023: #124. Yuriy Bykov’s The Owner

Published on January 11, 2023

The Owner

A film title that we’ve been tracking, anticipating and have been in wrong for several years now and what we do know is that The Owner is now in the can after what could have been a prolonged edit and some film fests aversion to programming possibly subversive Russian cinema. Yuriy Bykov moved into production around October of ’20 and his films have traveled well in prestige film fests: 2013’s The Major was in Cannes’ Critic’s Week, 2014’s The Fool preemed in Locarno, 2018’s The Factory preemed at TIFF. Ilya Stewart and Pavel Buria produced this project.

Gist: The Menshovs help a man named Rodin to escape from a road accident. Rodin turns out to be an official from the Federal Security Service. A friendship is struck, which, however, soon becomes a source of enormous problems for the Menshovs.

Release Date/Prediction: We’ve been attempting to predict where this will be showcased – we’d say Berlinale and still be in the wrong.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).