Burnt by the Sun (1994) on Netflix
Summer 1936. Komdiv Sergei Petrovich Kotov, a Civil War hero, is at his dacha with his wife Maroussia and their daughter Nadia. Maroussia's former fiancé Dmitri arrives from Moscow.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.8/1017,443 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes81%
Trailer
Plot summary
In the summer of 1936, a peasant from a nearby collective farm bursts into a banya to tell Komdiv Sergei Petrovich Kotov that Red Army tanks on maneuvers are about to flatten the wheat. Kotov, a senior Old Bolshevik and hero of the Civil War, rides out and orders the tank officer to halt. Back at his dacha, his wife Maroussia's relatives gather, and Dmitri, her former fiancé, who vanished in 1927, turns up in disguise. The family embraces him, and Nadia, Kotov's six-year-old daughter, meets him as Uncle Mitya. Maroussia is torn, and Kotov does not take the visit for a social call.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Burnt by the Sun (1994)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Burnt by the Sun won the Grand Prix at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, but Nikita Mikhalkov was said to be bitterly disappointed at missing the Palme d'Or, with the Russian press calling it a "defeat".
- Mikhalkov cast his own daughter Nadezhda as Kotov's daughter Nadia; she hoped her compensation would be a bicycle. He played Kotov himself because he believed it would make his daughter comfortable, saying certain scenes were "especially delicate on an emotional level".
- Burnt by the Sun is one of only four Russian films to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, along with War and Peace, Dersu Uzala and Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.
- Mikhalkov chose a fast shooting schedule out of consideration for his daughter Nadezhda, who was six at the time, remarking that "Children grow quickly and lose the tenderness, the simplicity, and the charm their youth carries".
- The Academy Award was voted on by attendees of the academy preview screening, since Burnt by the Sun was not in theatres in the U.S. at the time and only those attendees had seen all five nominated films.
- The film was aired on Russian television on the evening before the 1996 Russian presidential election, in a possible attempt to discredit Gennady Zyuganov's Communist Party.
