With Russia on everyone’s minds more than usual this year, we are thrilled to offer a brilliant cinematic look at this nation with Andrey Zvyagintsev’s LEVIATHAN. The film, winner for Best Screenplay and a nominee for the Palme d’Or at Cannes earlier this year, is a painterly, primordial tale about a proud patriarch fighting to protect his family home from a corrupt local official. Kolia lives in a small fishing town. It “puts contemporary Russia, as up-to-the-minute as Putin and Pussy Riot, under the microscope. LEVIATHAN is a stupendous piece of work that transcends language and borders.” The New York Daily News described the film as “a bleak, beautiful, and bitterly funny parable of post-Soviet Russia.”

Larry Rohter of the New York Times recently spoke to the filmmaker: 

In 2008, the Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev was in Manhattan shooting a chapter of the anthology film “New York, I Love You,” when he heard the story of an auto-repair shop owner in Colorado who had demolished the town hall and a former mayor’s house with an armored bulldozer after losing a zoning dispute. From that American seed has sprung “Leviathan,” a quintessentially Russian tragedy suffused with political and religious overtones.

“It was what this guy did, protesting against injustice, that impressed me most of all,” Mr. Zvyagintsev (pronounced ZVYA-ghin-tsev) said in an interview while in New York last month to promote “Leviathan,” which opens on Christmas Day. “My first feeling was, ‘Wow, what an amazing story, I absolutely need to do something with this.’ ”

His screenwriting partner, Oleg Negin, initially resisted, arguing, as Mr. Zvyagintsev recalled, that “this is an American story, why would we want this?” But as other influences drawn from the director’s reading made themselves felt — Heinrich von Kleist’s novella “Michael Kohlhaas,” the biblical Book of Job and, after the film already had its name, Hobbes’s treatise on the nature of the social contract — the specifically Russian characteristics of the movie’s story began to emerge.

The main character in “Leviathan” is Nikolai, who runs an auto-repair shop next to the house where he lives with his young wife and teenage son in a dead-end fishing village on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. The mayor wants that land and uses his power to try to force the family out, and when Nikolai resists, the resulting series of events crushes him and those trying to help him.

Diverse as their origins may be, all of Mr. Zvyagintsev’s source materials share a common theme: the resistance of the individual to some arbitrary exercise of authority. That power may be corporate, political or even divine, but in each case, there is “a collision between a little person and a vast structure, the Leviathan,” Mr. Zvyagintsev explained.

“In a country like Russia, all the security, all the protection a member of society gets is from the establishment, police, army, health providers,” he said. “In exchange, people have to give back their freedom. I was overwhelmed with this idea. I saw it as a deal a human being might make with the Devil. Freedom is the main value a human being has, but sometimes, people don’t even notice it is being taken, because they are following the guarantees they were given.”

“Leviathan” thus appears to be an indictment of corruption and cynicism in Vladimir Putin’s increasingly authoritarian Russia. One scene, a brutal shakedown, takes place in the mayor’s office as a portrait of Mr. Putin looks on, and in another, two characters on a picnic excursion shoot up portraits of Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev and joke about when those now in power might be added to the garbage heap.

“This is how a Russian person treats power, with irony and contempt,” Mr. Zvyagintsev said when asked about that scene’s significance. “If people hold high positions, they should expect to be treated like that, if they have common sense, if they have self-irony.”

It was suggested to him that Mr. Putin lacked both a sense of humor and self-irony. “Yes, it’s a very hard job,” he replied, deadpan, declining to say anything further on the subject.

“Leviathan” has made a splash internationally. It won an award for best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival last spring, was nominated this month for a Golden Globe for best foreign language film, and, to the surprise of those who thought its audacious subject matter would doom its chances, it is also Russia’s submission for the Oscar in that category. A. O. Scott of The New York Times named it one of the 10 best films of 2014.

Within Russia, “Leviathan,” which was partly financed by a government fund for filmmaking, has been controversial. “It’s talented, but I don’t like it,” the country’s minister of culture, Vladimir Medinsky, said last summer. For a while, until Mr. Zvyagintsev agreed to bleep offending words, it even appeared that the film would fall afoul of a new law that went into effect in July prohibiting obscene language in cultural projects.

But “Leviathan” is not exclusively — or even primarily, if Mr. Zvyagintsev is to be believed — about politics in today’s Russia. As reflected in his three earlier films, including “Elena,” released in the United States in 2012, he is deeply interested in moral and even overtly religious questions and describes Nikolai as “a righteous sufferer, the subject of an experiment.”

Nancy Condee, author of “The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema” and a specialist in Russian and Soviet cultural politics at the University of Pittsburgh, described Mr. Zvyangintsev as a director “actively and intensely engaged with spiritual issues in an allegorical biblical framework. “He is clearly a deep believer, in a noninstitutional sense,” she continued, and his films are full of “arrows pointing up to the sky, pitching you upward, away from a reality that is debased.”

In the scene that gives the movie its title, Nikolai, drunk and depressed, encounters a Russian Orthodox priest and questions the fate that has befallen him. The priest, a confidant of the mayor, responds by quoting from the Book of Job: “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down his tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in his nose, or pierce his jaw with a hook? Will he make many supplications to you? Will he speak to you soft words? Will he make a covenant with you?”

The Russian actor Aleksey Serebryakov, who plays Nikolai, said by telephone this month that “the most complex thing in this role, in my character’s life, is this question: ‘Where are you, merciless God?’ ”

For all its grim subject matter, “Leviathan” is beautiful visually, with one long shot after another conferring a stark beauty on a harsh and barren landscape. In an email, Sitora Alieva, program director of the Kinotavr Open Russian Film Festival in Sochi, said that Mr. Zvyagintsev brings a “unique poetic taste to cinema” and describes him as the most famous Russian film director working today.

But early in his career, Mr. Zvyagintsev, now 50, did not seem a likely candidate for such distinctions. He was born well outside the Moscow-St. Petersburg axis that dominates Russian culture, in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, and after moving to Moscow struggled for years to find a niche, first as an actor and then as a director. Among his early efforts was a commercial for a furniture store.

“He comes from the provinces, and that is something important to take into consideration,” said Peter Rollberg, the author of “The A to Z of Russian and Soviet Cinema” and a professor of Slavic languages and film studies at George Washington University. “Coming from far away, he brings a freshness of perception.”

Asked about growing pressures on free expression, Mr. Zvyagintsev said that given that he was born in Russia and had lived there his entire life, he hoped to be able to continue making films in his homeland. But Mr. Serebryakov moved his family to Canada three years ago, saying then that he would “like my children to grow up under a fundamentally different ideology” than the system of “coarse intolerance and aggressive behavior” he saw prevailing in Russia. He now returns home only for work on projects like “Leviathan.”

“To tell you the truth, I’d rather speak about the movie,” he said in response to a request to elaborate on those earlier remarks. “I’m not inclined to speak about politics. Yes, it’s a rather complex situation in Russia today, but I really hope it will change.”

What’s it like to try to get to know a flying dinosaur? In PELICAN DREAMS, Sundance and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Judy Irving (“The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill”) follows a wayward California brown pelican from her “arrest” on the Golden Gate Bridge into care at a wildlife rehabilitation facility, and from there explores pelicans’ nesting grounds, Pacific coast migration, and survival challenges.

Newsweek Magazine just published this piece about the film. It begins, “‘A friend of mine was in this traffic jam,’ Judy Irving recalls. ‘She said, ‘You’ll never guess why I was held up on the bridge.” It’s not unusual for traffic to come to a stop on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge: There’s the ever-more-L.A.-like traffic, the occasional protest or suicide jumper. But in this case it was a pelican that stopped the show and Irving knew she had her next movie.”

On October 31 we open the Swedish film FORCE MAJEURE, Ruben Östlund’s wickedly funny and precisely observed psychodrama about a seemingly model married couple who suddenly find themselves in crisis after the husband does something extremely cowardly and selfish. Written and directed by Östlund (Play, Involuntary), the film was a word-of-mouth sensation at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where it won the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard. Östlund recently sat for an interview with Indiewire’s Ryan Lattanzio to talk about this top contender for the Foreign Language Oscar:

Indiewire: What initially interested you about a couple in crisis?

Östlund: It started with the avalanche: I had been skiing a lot and when I was between 20 and 25, I was making ski films in the Alps, traveling around Europe and in North America. Then I went to film school, and I left the ski world behind me, and I was trying to go back to the ski world, and to highlight the absurdity of that world. I was inspired by a YouTube clip of a group of people sitting at an outdoor restaurant filming an avalanche tumbling down the mountain. I was interested in the three seconds where it goes from “wow, beautiful” to nervous laughter to total panic.

Then I developed the idea and got to the point where someone said, “What if the father is running away from his wife and his kids when this happens?” Immediately I understood that this situation is raising questions about gender, expectations on gender, the role of the man and the role of the woman. If you see the ski resort, it’s totally constructed around the nuclear family. All the apartments are made for a mother, a father and their kids. It was a setup of holiday, the avalanche, the man doing something that is so forbidden when it comes to the expectations of the man, and that made me dive into the questions in between the relationships after this incident.

I read sociological studies about airplane hijacking. You can tell from this study that the frequency of divorce is extremely high after airplane hijacking. It points out expectations about how we should behave in a crisis situation and when a man isn’t the hero he’s expected to be, couples have a really hard time getting over that.

What’s so absurd about the world of ski resorts?

The tourists dressed up in neon colors, and the goggles, the well-to-do people who don’t have problems in their lives. I was fond of the idea of messing things up for those people, having them meeting human mechanisms that you mostly see in war or a nature catastrophe: they don’t have any experience how they would react when in survival instinct mood. The ski resort itself is like a metaphor: there’s a constant struggle between man and nature. The civilized, trying to control the force of nature. The resort is always trying to stabilize the snow. There was something about that that fit the subject of the film very well.

To read the full interview, go to Indiewire.com.