Arras, a medium-sized city in northern France, on a November evening in 2025. Despite the cold settling, a line had formed in the center of town. The 900 moviegoers were the lucky ones; they would be the first in France to see Olivier Assayas’s latest film, screened at the Arras Film Festival. The Wizard of the Kremlin, which depicts Vladimir Putin and one of his advisers, was billed by organizers as “a gripping geopolitical thriller where fiction takes hold of reality.”

British actor Jude Law plays the Russian president in this big-budget production, made with a €23 million budget. “A film in English, shot in Latvia, with American and Latvian actors and a French crew, aimed primarily at a French audience,” summarized Olivier Assayas as he introduced it to the public. The director, who did not respond to Le Monde‘s requests for an interview, alluded to the obstacle-filled journey of his feature film, from its source of inspiration – a sometimes controversial book – to the filming itself, a curious Franco-Russian tale set against a Latvian backdrop.

A warning appears on the screen: “The film remains a work of art. The characters, as well as their statements and opinions, are fictitious.” Most of the protagonists, however, are based on real-life figures, including the oligarch Boris Berezovsky (1946-2013), chess player Garry Kasparov and Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007). Before long, viewers find themselves swept into Moscow parties filled with alcohol and drugs, and into the corridors of the Kremlin. At the heart of the story is a communications strategist tasked with taking us as close as possible to Putin. The mastermind is him: Paul Dano on screen, Vladislav Surkov in real life.

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