Leviathan
The acclaimed Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev won the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes for this pitch-black tale of a car mechanic fighting to protect his family home from a corrupt local official.
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 lives with his teenage son Roma and second wife Lilya. Their idyllic homestead harbours deep-rooted familial resentments that are aggravated by the aggressions of the local mayor Vadim, a drunken, corrupt bureaucrat set on grabbing their land for himself. When Kolya calls in his lawyer friend Dima from Moscow, this defensive tactic triggers a series of dramatic events. (source: www.tiff.net)