Post-Soviet Russian Cinema

"Burnt by the Sun"

(Russia and France, 1994)

This Academy Award-winning feature (Best Foreign Language Film) is a wonderfully intimate, Chekhovian idyll set in Stalinist Russia, which, at its conclusion, packs an explosive political climax. Director Nikita Mikhalkov plays a legendary revolutionary hero living in a dacha outside Moscow with family and friends. Most of the film's complex relationships are seen through the innocent eyes of Mikhalkov's (and the hero's) beautiful daughter in a film that gently reveals the tragedy of living under Stalinism.