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Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan wins main foreign film prize at Munich festival

Leviathan already won Best Screenplay in Cannes

© ITAR TASS / Vladimir Smirnov

BERLIN, July 05, 23:54 /ITAR-TASS/. Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan has won the main prize at the 32nd Munich Film Festival in the best foreign film category and received the ARRI/OSRAM Award.

Leviathan already won Best Screenplay in Cannes. Producer Alexander Rodnyansky accepted the Prize valued at 50,000 euros from donors Franz Kraus (ARRI) and Hans-Joachim Schwabe (Osram). The Jury consisted of actress Fatemeh Motamed Arya, critic Marc Admas and film expert Intishal Al Timiti.

The film’s main character, Kolya, lives in a small town near the Barents Sea in northern Russia. He has his own auto-repair shop which stands next to the house where he lives with his young wife Lilya and his son Roma from a previous marriage. Vadim Shelevyat, the Mayor of the town, wants to take away his business, his house and his land. First he tries buying off Kolya, but Kolya cannot stand losing everything he has, not only the land, but also all the beauty that has surrounded him from the day of his birth. So the mayor starts to use more aggressive methods.

The film is “a mix of Hobbes, Chekhov and the Bible, and full of extraordinary images and magnificent symmetry... So much cinema is content with small fry - minor themes and manageable topics. Leviathan is hunting bigger game. It is a movie with real grandeur,” Peter Bradshaw from theguardian.com wrote.

The lead roles are played by Alexei Serebryakov, Yelena Lyadova, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Roman Madyanov and Anna Ukolova.

The Munich Film Festival opened on June 27. Held since 1983 and being the second-largest film festival in Germany after Berlinale, it has featured about 160 films from more than 50 countries.

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