Burnt by the Sun

Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun (Утомлённые солнцем) won the Grand Prix at Cannes 1994 (jointly with Zhang Yimou's To Live) and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1995, becoming one of the most internationally celebrated post-Soviet Russian films. Mikhalkov co-wrote the screenplay with Rustam Ibragimbekov and gave himself the central role; his then-six-year-old daughter Nadezhda Mikhalkova plays his on-screen daughter Nadya.

Summer 1936. Colonel Sergei Kotov (Mikhalkov), a decorated hero of the Russian Civil War now in retirement, is sunning himself at his rural dacha with his young wife Maroussia (Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė) and their daughter Nadya, surrounded by Maroussia's extended bourgeois family (the kind of refined pre-revolutionary intelligentsia that the Stalinist apparatus of the period treated with particular suspicion. A figure from Maroussia's past arrives unannounced) Mitya (Oleg Menshikov), a former pianist and former lover, charming and watchful, and the day's slow rituals begin to take on a different weight.

Pavel Lebeshev's photography of the Volga countryside, Eduard Artemyev's score, and Mikhalkov's own central performance combine into one of the most distinctive achievements of post-Soviet cinema. The film's structural patience (the long sun-soaked summer day that contains all of its movement) has made it permanently distinctive in the Russian-language post-Soviet canon.