Companies :
Нон-Стоп Продакшн. Non-Stop Production, avec le soutien du Ministère de la Culture de la Fédération de Russie, du Fonds du cinéma et de la fondation RuArts
With the film's magisterial opening — the coastal landscape of the Barents Sea, set to the clarion call of Philip Glass's symphonic score — Zvyagintsev sets the stage for a story in which human intrigues are indistinguishable from forces of nature
In a small seaside town, weather-beaten patriarch Kolya (Alexey Serebryakov) lives with his teenage son Roma (Sergey Pokhadaev) and second wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova). Their idyllic homestead harbours deep-rooted familial resentments that are aggravated by the aggressions of the local mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov), a drunken, corrupt bureaucrat set on grabbing their land for himself. When Kolya calls in his lawyer friend Dima (Vladimir Vdovitchenkov) from Moscow, this defensive tactic triggers a series of dramatic events.
In the hands of Zvyagintsev and co-writer Oleg Negin (previous collaborators on the 2011 Festival selection Elena), the premise expands from a rural-scale morality play to a philosophical examination of contemporary Russian society. Zvyagintsev and his regular cinematographer Mikhail Krichman give a painterly, meditative rendering to this tale whose near-primordial themes have their roots in Thomas Hobbes and the Book of Job.
Source : http://www.tiff.net/festivals/thefestival/programmes/
One of the most controversial Russian films of recent times.
Leviathan premiered in May 2014 at the Cannes Film Festival, and the film was not released in Russian theaters until February 2015. During this time, a lot has happened : the film was purged of "obscene" expressions , because of which Zvyagintsev's film was banned from theatrical screening, and then the original version was published on the Internet.