Literature & Cinema - Moscow - page 433

Glasnost & Transition
During a 1986 congress of Soviet filmmakers held in Moscow, glasnost touched the USSR's
movie industry. By a large vote the old conservative directors were booted out of the leader-
ship and renegades demanding more freedom were put in their place.
Over 250 previously banned films were released. As such, some of the most politically
daring and artistically innovative works finally made it off the shelf and onto the big screen
for audiences to see for the first time. By the end of the Soviet regime, Mosfilm was one of
Europe's largest and most prolific film studios, with over 2500 films to its credit.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the film industry fell on hard times. Funding had
dried up during the economic chaos of the early 1990s and audiences couldn't afford to go
to the cinema anyway. Mosfilm was finally reorganised into a quasi-private concern, al-
though it continued to receive significant state patronage.
At this low point, ironically, Mosfilm produced one of its crowning achievements - the
Cannes Grand Prize and Academy Award-winning film Burnt by the Sun (1994), featuring
the work of actor and director Nikita Mikhailkov. The story of a loyal apparatchik who be-
comes a victim of Stalin's purges, the film demonstrated that politics and cinema were still
inextricably linked.
In 2010 Nikita Mikhailkov used the largest production budget ever seen in Russian cinema
to make the sequel to his 1994 masterpiece. Burnt by the Sun IIreceived universally neg-
ative reviews and was a box-office flop.