Emotionally austere, consciously mythic and ruggedly beautiful, The Return is a Russian arthouse film of the old school. Viewers from Minsk to Minneapolis will sense the ghost of Tarkovsky hovering over its epic-length shots, brooding characters and emphasis on the wonders and terrors of the natural world. The jury at the Venice International Film Festival last year interpreted The Return's arrival as something momentous, duly awarding it the fest's top prize, the Golden Lion.

Like two other Russian films of recent note -- Koktebel and Alexander Sokurov's rapturous Father and Son -- The Return is an intense drama about paternal bonds. Two adolescent brothers -- Andrey (Vladimir Garin) and Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov) -- living in a town north of St. Petersburg come home one day to discover that their father has returned after a 12-year absence. Often brutal yet capable of tenderness, the unnamed father (Konstantin Lavronenko) takes the boys on a trip to a remote island. The reunion is imperilled by the physical arduousness of the journey, the boys' suspicions about the father's motives and the shifting dynamics among the three.

Although The Return sometimes emulates its '60s and '70s art-film antecedents too slavishly, it is a captivating debut. Director Andrey Zvyagintsev's achievement is all the more impressive considering that he had no formal training as a filmmaker. During an interview at last September's Toronto International Film Festival, he explained how he learned his craft. "I would say that the school I went to was the Museum of Cinema in Moscow," he says through a translator. "I used to go there and watch two or three films a day. I watched masterpieces by Antonioni, Bergman, Bertolucci, Godard, Bresson, Tarkovsky. I learned the general context of cinema this way. Literature should be written for people of the same language because they will receive it the best -- they know all the nuances. But cinema is an international language because it's based on images that everyone can understand."

Adding poignance to The Return's win at Venice was the news that Garin died shortly after the film was shot, drowning in the same lake where his character Andrey is seen swimming. Even if The Return had not been blighted by this tragedy, Garin and Dobronravov's performances would be remarkable. Zvyagintsev spent five months in Moscow and St. Petersburg trying to cast their roles.

"It's not very correct to base all your searches and casting only on the script because you may never find the exact people," he says. "You have to look for someone who is more flexible, who can be an actor, who has something that radiated from inside. So when I found Vladimir and Ivan, they had very deep personalities. Although they were very young, their personalities were fully in place. For example, Vladimir had the same nature as his character. He was very kind, open and frank, as he is in the film -- he didn't have to act much. Vanya [Ivan], on the other hand, had to show somebody else, someone who is naughty and aggressive. He had to change himself because in reality he was as nice as Vladimir."

And thanks to the care that Lavronenko takes in the role, the father never becomes a mere bully to the boys. Zvyagintsev struggled to give the character the shading and gravitas appropriate to a movie as rich as The Return. "I don't want to humiliate the original scriptwriter when I say we had to throw out the beginning and ending," says the director. "The film in the script was in a certain genre. It was a real action movie and the father was a hero like Batman or Spider-Man but a very brutal person. I made him more human. Also, I changed the movement of time and nature of the events -- it went from an action movie to an arthouse movie."