Russian lawmaker wants budget funding recovered from 'Leviathan' film director
ST. PETERSBURG. Jan 17 (Interfax) - Member of the St. Petersburg legislature Vitaly Milonov urged Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday to recover the budget funding provided to film director Andrey Zvyagintsev for making the film 'Leviathan' back to the state coffers.
"The film director pictured life in Russia in the darkest colors, creating an atmosphere of a deep spiritual crisis and distorting the reality to the point of a phantasmagoric and Rabelaisian caricature. Too bad films like Leviathan are filmed on the money taken from taxpayers, who are expecting absolutely different works and films," Milonov said in a letter, quoted by his press service.
Zvyagintsev's 'Leviathan' won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film this year, and has been nominated for Oskar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Milonov, meanwhile, claimed that the film is "a set of Rossophobic stereotypes that aim to create a negative image of the Russian state and society."
"The film director used people's money to make a dishonest and anti-national picture which is conspicuously at odds with traditional Russian culture, discredits the classical school of Russian cinematography and is inciting hatred in society," he said.
Milonov urged Medvedev to instruct Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky to initiate the recovery of the budget money provided to the film-director.
'Leviathan' is a modern re-working of the Book of Job in a Russian setting. The filming proceeded in the town of Kirovsk and in the village of Teriberka in the Murmansk region. It shows a family living on the shores of the Barents Sea whose house is being taken away from them by the local mayor who wants to use the land for his own purposes.
The film is to be officially released on February 5.