ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE: BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
When the mayor of a Russian coastal town uses eminent domain to seize a home, the owner fights back–but he can’t win against the corrupt and all-powerful Leviathan state. [ Leviathan credits: Dir: Andrey Zvyagintsev/ Aleksey Serebryakov, Elena Lyadova, Roman Madyanov/ 140 min/ Drama/ Eminent Domain, Corrupt Government]
External Reviews
“Rarely has a movie so resoundingly anatomized the brutal consequences of institutionalized thuggery.”
–Christian Science Monitor
“Vast northern vistas provide the setting for a classic confrontation between a little guy and an implacably corrupt government.”
–The Wall Street Journal
“Stunningly shot and superbly acted…this is film-making on a grand scale.”
–The Guardian
“Vladimir Putin’s Russia – brutal, carnivorous, delusional, but monstrously well-evolved for crushing both spirits and lives large and small – is taken to task in this excoriating portrait of the state’s omnivorous hunger for control in a far-flung northern fishing community on the Barents Sea.”
–The Austin Chronicle
“A thinly veiled political parable drenched in bitter irony that takes aim against the corrupt, corrosive regime of Vladimir Putin.”
–The Hollywood Reporter
“This unforgettable portrait gives viewers a vivid, melancholy sense of what life in Russia is like for citizens exhausted by political oppression and now bludgeoned by institutional impunity and rot.”
–Washington Post
How to See It
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Links
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“[Living in Russia is] like being in a minefield, this is the feeling you live with here. It’s very hard to build any kind of prospects – in life, in your profession, in your career – if you are not plugged in to the values of the system.”
–“Leviathan director Andrei Zvyagintsev: ‘Living in Russia is like being in a minefield’,” The Guardian