Nikita Mikhalkov's sequel to his Oscar-winning movie Burnt by the Sun will be screened as part of the 63rd Cannes International Film Festival.

The premiere of the movie in Russia will take place on April 22, dated to coincide with the 65th anniversary of the victory in World War II. Burnt by the Sun 2, a movie about the war and about a family who are struggling through it, was recognized as the most expensive Russian movie of all times with its budget totaling some $55 million.

The predecessor of Burnt by the Sun 2 received an award in Cannes in 1994. It has become a legend of Russian cinema, filmed in the early 1990s, when the Russian economy was in tatters and Russian cinema was in danger of going extinct.

A movie that touched the hearts of millions was filmed for $2.8 million (a huge sum in those times) and showed us a day in life of a family in the year 1936. The story was finished, the future of the heroes was revealed, and the movie itself received an Oscar for the Best Foreign Film. However, Nikita Mikhalkov had announced that he was planning to make a sequel that will detail the fates of the characters going through the war.

A total of 16 movies have made it onto this year's Cannes program. The list of the films was announced Wednesday at a media conference. However, major world new agencies – Agence France-Presse, Reuters, AP and Getty TV – set out to boycott the announcement of the films selected for this year's program because of the newly introduced rules that sharply restrict video news-gathering at the Festival's events for the first time in its 63 years of history.