New Bedford, Massachusetts: at one time the whaling capital of the world and Melville’s inspiration for "Moby Dick", it is today the country’s largest fishing port with over 500 ships sailing from its harbor every month. Leviathan follows one such vessel, a hulking groundfish trawler, into the surrounding murky black waters on a weeks-long fishing expedition. But instead of romanticizing the labor, filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel present a vivid, almost-kaleidoscopic representation of the work, the sea, the machinery and the players, both human and marine.