Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun 2 is due to be screened for the first time in 20 Russian cities on April 17th. The movie actually consists of two parts, and it's the first one that's due to be screened now. In May the film by the prominent Russian filmmaker is due to hit the screen of the famous Cannes Film Festival. The movie is part of the Festival's main event.

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 at Cannes. Therefore I think that what is important now is, first, that a Russian movie is part of the competition, since the last time this happened was long ago; secondly, a presence at Cannes is like sending an impulse for distribution the world over. A company that buys a film to show it around the world sees it as quite important that the movie be part of the Cannes Festival's main event. But then, I am not really looking forward to anything special, no hope to that end." But did Mikhalkov hope to win an Oscar when he shot his first Burnt by the Sun 16 years ago? Hardly so. But the film, an ordinary story of one day of a large family in the countryside, met with response and appraisal, and won the prestigious U.S. Academy Award.

That film was about an aged professor and his wife, prerevolutionary intellectuals, a military leader who is a hero of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War, and his young wife and charming little daughter. There was also a family friend turned traitor and executioner of the family. A summer day in 1936 began carelessly and calmly, but ended in tragedy: the heroic military leader Kotov was arrested by agents of the Security Police. The audience was almost certain that he would hardly survive life in the concentration camps and would be eventually added to the millions of victims of Stalin's political purges.

But the film Burnt by the Sun 2 resurrects Kotov to throw him into the heat of the Second World War during the hardest period of fighting – from 1941 to 1943, when the Red Army was retreating under the pressure of Nazi troops. Nikita Mikhalkov feels that the war against Nazi Germany was made up of tens of millions of individual wars with their moments of joy and grief, and their victories. As the filmmaker narrates a private story in his movie, he is trying nonetheless to create a polyphonic image of war and its heroes' fates.

The second part of Burnt by the Sun 2 is due to hit the screens in autumn of this year. Nikita Mikhalkov says this is a kind of response to Steven Spielberg's movie Saving Private Ryan. Mikhalkov says he was taken aback by the way young viewers in France, for example, reacted to that film. "When watching Saving Private Ryan, one was made to believe that the most terrible and fierce war in human history was won by Russia's U.S. and European allies, though it is perfectly well known that the Allies didn't join the war till 1944, when it was already clear the USSR would be able to defeat the Nazis on its own. That is why I was itching to make a film that would boost the national immune system," Mikhalkov says. But his most important goal, of course, is that people come to realize that life is an absolutely invaluable gift, he adds.