Oscar-nominated Russian drama Leviathan is being praised abroad but panned at home

The film, which won the Black Pearl and Best Actor awards at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival last year, will not be released in Russia until February, but that hasn’t proved an impediment to criticism, with some saying it channels anti-patriotic sentiments to win western plaudits.

Aleksey Serebryakov in a scene from Leviathan, which depicts his character’s struggle against a corrupt system. Sony Pictures Classics

The Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev's sombre social drama Leviathan may have been nominated for an Oscar, but at home the film has sparked heated debate, with the country's arts minister claiming it blackens Russia's image.

The film, which won the Black Pearl and Best Actor awards at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival last year, will not even be released in Russia until next month, but that hasn't proved an impediment to criticism, reminding observers of the Soviet line about the hate campaign against Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago: "I haven't read it but I condemn it."

The Gazeta.ru news website says: “Those who have seen the film and those who haven’t seen it are heatedly arguing about it today. Probably because those who are arguing don’t really have opposing views on cinema – they have opposing views on the country.”

Leviathan, which won Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes and Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival, is a bleak portrayal of one man's struggle against the stifling omnipotence of the Russian state.

It depicts a car mechanic in a small northern city who struggles against a corrupt mayor’s plans to take away his property.

The divisive and outspoken culture minister Vladimir Medinsky gave an interview on the day of the Oscar nominations to the daily newspaper Izvestia in which he attacked the director and his vision.

The movie has a mood of “existential hopelessness” and “there is not a single positive hero,” he said, adding that the characters are not “real Russians”.

The minister accused the director of cynically exploiting anti-Russian tropes to win festival plaudits.

“What does he love? Golden statuettes and red carpets, that’s pretty clear,” said Medinsky, adding the film “in its rush for international success, is opportunistic beyond belief”.

The minister denigrated the film even though it was partly funded by the state.

Because of legislation brought in by Medinsky, Leviathan, which has already been released in France and Britain, can only be shown in Russia with the profanity beeped out. It will be released on February 5.

Acclaimed abroad, Zvyagintsev has faced accusations of not being patriotic since his 2003 debut The Return, which swept the board at the Venice International Film Festival. His success in the West is held against him by some.

In an editorial, state news agency TASS wrote the film featured “typical clichés that are successfully ‘sold’ by our directors in the West”.

It said the film confirmed westerners’ worst fears about Russia so they could say to themselves: “Look how bad everything is there, they admit it themselves.”

A senior Orthodox Church spokesman backed Medinsky’s accusations.

"It's obvious that it's made to cater to a western audience, or rather to the western elite, since it consciously repeats popular myths about Russia," said spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin to Izvestia, while admitting he had not seen the film.

Some Orthodox fundamentalist activists even called for a ban on the film, which depicts clerics as involved in corruption.

Kirill Frolov, the head of a group called the Association of Orthodox Experts, told Izvestia that "Leviathan is evil and there is no place for evil on cinema release".

Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst, tweeted that the film is an “anti-Putin cinema manifesto”.

But many critics and arts figures praised the film, saying the accusations against it simply did not stand up.

"There's no point in arguing with naive, unprofessional theories that Zvyagintsev makes his characters soak up vodka and criticise the authorities just to get into western film festivals," wrote the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda's critic Stas Tyrkin, calling Leviathan a film about "the here and now".

“Artists don’t exist to beautifully depict Russian birches, Russian meadows and Russian lakes. That’s absurd,” said the popular theatre director Konstantin Bogomolov, speaking to the news agency Ura.ru.

“The task of a Russian artist is to create great works.”