The battle between good and evil gets quite a workout in the 2007 Russian Resurrection Film Festival, the annual showcase of contemporary Russian cinema. Now in its fourth year, the festival has grown from Sydney and Melbourne to include all state capitals. This year Russian Resurrection includes 10 contemporary films, from epic fantasy and vampire-horror flicks to war dramas and art-house romances. It opens in Melbourne on August 30, with [Nikolai Lebedev's] Wolfhound, the sword-and-sorcery epic that topped the Russian box office last year. Costing $US10 million, a huge budget by Russian standards, ... [T]he scale of the Wolfhound project is unprecedented in post-Soviet cinema. ... Also showing at the festival is Timur Bekmambetov's Day Watch, the sequel to his 2004 vampire thriller Night Watch, which broke box-office records. These films, with their big budgets and fantastic special effects, signal a new era in post-Soviet filmmaking.

"We had a very difficult time in Russia, not in the movie business only," Lebedev says. "The industrial (sector) collapsed, so we had no opportunity to make expensive movies during the '90s and right up until the beginning of the millennium. Now we have a new opportunity because we have a new audience, who watch movies not only at home but in theaters. Now movie theaters start to make money, so our producers start to put money into movie production. I think we will make more and more expensive movies. It's not a question of love of new genres or something like that, it's just economical." ...

As this new era of big-budget Russian cinema dawns, some critics are worried that films of substance will lose out to rouble-raising thrillers. Since Wolfhound's enormous success, Lebedev has been fielding offers from producers for more of the same, but has formed his own production company with actor Yevgeny Mironov. ...