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/
