Winner of the Cannes Film Festival to be announced on Sunday.

CANNES, May 23 (Itar-Tass) - The winner of the 63rd Cannes Film
Festival will be announced on Sunday. The festival's closing ceremony
will start at 21:30 Moscow time on Sunday.
Nineteen pictures took part in the main contest, including "Burnt by
the Sun 2" by Russian film director Nikita Mikhalkov. Any of them can win
the Golden Palm award.
"Burnt by the Sun 2" was shown at the festival on Saturday. In his
film, Mikhalkov showed the fates of a father and a daughter in the
whirlpool of dramatic historical events, such as Stalin's repressions and
the Second World War.
"I didn't plan to shoot the continuation to 'Burnt by the Sun'.
However, I had to return to it after seeing 'Save Private Ryan', a
brilliant film by Steven Spielberg. When I was coming out of a cinema
house in Paris, I hear people talking. For them Operation Overload in
Normandy was the main event of World War II," Mikhalkov told a news
conference on Saturday.
"It was then that I decided to show what happened on the other side of
Europe and what losses our people had to sustain. For that I re-animated
some of my heroes, a method often used by other authors," Mikhalkov
explained.
"Burnt by the Sun 2" impressed Western audiences by unfamiliar scenes
of mass murder of Soviet people by fascists, particularly an episode of
setting ablaze a barn where the residents of an entire village had been
locked. Never before had the Cannes festival seen such horrible scenes of
the mass death of people in the summer and autumn of 1941.
At the same time, the picture is very lyrical. It tells about
relations between a father and a daughter.
"My film is not for or against Stalin. He is of no importance,"
Mikhalkov stressed at the news conference. My film is about love and faith
which the father and the daughter preserve for each other," he added.
The jury saw a shortened version of "Burnt by the Sun 2". It lasted
for two and a half hours.
The first "Burnt by the Sun" won the festival's second prize - the
Grand Prix - in 1994.
Mikhalkov said that a third part of "Burnt by the Sun" would appear on
the screens this autumn.
Asked to comment on the situation in the Russian Union of Film Makers,
Mikhalkov said that a split of which there had been much talk was minimal.
"Out of 97 people who signed a letter of intentions to leave the
Union, 30 have never been its members. Another thirty have been refusing
to pay their membership dues for the past five or ten years. That
automatically deprives them of their membership. Two more people have been
residing abroad for more than 30 years. One of them - Otar Ioseliani -
cannot withdraw from the Union because he has never been its member. Out
of those who remain only four people have really submitted an application
of withdrawal. So you yourselves can see the scale of this, as some say,
colossal international scandal," Mikhalkov said.

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