You all remember this title, right? But we are here today to talk about Burnt by the Sun 2, or, a sequel to well known Nikita Mikhalkov‘s 1994 film.
This Russian drama film is scheduled to compete for the Golden Palm at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.
It’s a World War II epic with a budget of 55 million dollars, which makes it the most expensive Russian film ever since Soviet times! The sequel was divided into 2 parts: Burnt by the Sun 2: Exodus and Burnt by the Sun 3: The Citadel.
So, the film is about an aged professor and his wife, the pre-revolutionary intellectuals, and of a military leader, the hero of the Bolshevik revolution and Civil War, as well of his young wife and charming little daughter. There is also a family friend-turned traitor and executioner of the family.
A summer day of 1936 begins carelessly and calmly, but ends in a tragedy, the heroic military leader Kotov is arrested by security police agents. The audience is almost certain that he would hardly survive life in concentration camps and would be eventually added to the millions of victims of Stalin’s political purges.
Burnt by the Sun 2: Exodus official synopsis: “1941. Five years have passed since the lives and destinies of General Kotov, his wife Maroussia, their daughter Nadia – as well as those of Mitia and the Sverbitski family – were irrevocably changed.
Five years of incarceration for General Kotov, the former Revolutionary hero betrayed by Stalin, who escapes certain death in the Gulag and finds himself fighting at the front as a private.
Five years of terror for Maroussia, without the husband she believes dead and the daughter who has rejected her.
For Nadia, five years of hiding – always proud of the valiant father who she refuses to disown and whom she believes is alive, despite all reports to the contrary.
Five years of survival for Mitia who, having survived a suicide attempt, reluctantly continues to execute the orders of a regime he holds in contempt.
And five years for Comrade Stalin who, finding himself attacked by former ally Adolf Hitler, is forced to recall the elite he had exiled to the camps and to mobilize the Russian population – by any means necessary – to rise against the threat of fascism.”
Burnt by the Sun 2: Exodus is written, directed and produced by Nikita Mikhalkov, and he’s also starring as Col. Sergei Petrovich Kotov.
The rest of the cast includes Oleg Menshikov as Mitya, Nadezhda Mikhalkova as Nadya, Viktoriya Tolstoganova as Marusia, Vladimir Ilyin as Kirik, Mikhail Efremov, Andrey Panin and Tagir Rakhimov.
As to the Cannes festival, Nikita Mikhalkov says: “I am not really excited any more. This will be the fourth time that my film has competed in Cannes. Therefore I think that what is important now is, first, that a Russian movie form part of the competition, since last time this happened long ago.
Secondly, the presence in Cannes is sort of getting an impulse for distribution the world over. A company that buys a film for showing it around the world sees it as quite important that the movie be part of the Cannes festival main event. But then, I am not really looking to anything special, no hope to that end.”
Maybe this kind of attitude comes from a fact that Burnt by Sun 2: Exodus (that opened in Russian theaters on April 22, 2010) gathered only less than 4 millions in box-office?
Who knows, but we really wish him good luck at Cannes, and we’re hoping to enjoy his ordinary story that once won the prestigious US Academy award.
