Leviathan

Andrei Zvyagintsev's Leviathan won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes 2014 and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. The film was Russia's official Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film and consolidated Zvyagintsev, after his earlier The Return (2003) and Elena (2011), as the most internationally significant Russian director of his generation; he would extend the same broad register through Loveless (2017).

In a remote northern Russian town on the Barents Sea coast, a working-class car mechanic named Kolya (Aleksei Serebryakov) fights a corrupt mayor (Roman Madyanov) who is attempting to seize his family's small home and land for a private development. Kolya enlists the help of his old friend Dima (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), now a Moscow lawyer with leverage on the mayor through accumulated documentary evidence. Elena Lyadova plays Kolya's wife Lilya. The film follows the legal-procedural battle and the broader social-pressure environment that surrounds it.

The film's central thesis, that the contemporary Russian state, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian legal system, and Russian-bureaucratic-customary practice combine into the kind of crushing institutional hostility the Old Testament Leviathan reference implies, produced sharp political controversy in Russia at the time of release. The Russian Ministry of Culture (which had partly funded the production) publicly objected; Zvyagintsev defended the film's treatment without apology. Mikhail Krichman's photography of the Murmansk-region Barents coast and the abandoned ruined church-and-fishing-fleet exteriors is among the most distinctive landscape registers of recent Russian cinema.