The military drama of the Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov "Burnt by the Sun 2: The Citadel" was released on Russian and world screens in May 2011. The film became a logical continuation of the drama "Burnt by the Sun".
In 1994, the Russian-French war drama Burnt by the Sun made a splash in the film community and won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Despite the fact that the ending of the picture was quite unambiguous, a few years later director Nikita Mikhalkov decided to return to the story of divisional commander Sergei Kotov, his wife Marusya, daughter Nadia and a family friend who turned out to be a traitor, an employee of the NKVD Mitya. In 2010, the sequel to Burnt by the Sun was released. The second part of the trilogy, entitled "Anticipation", became the highest-budget Russian film as of 2012.
The final picture, "The Citadel", was supposed to appear in wide distribution in November 2010, but the premiere was postponed to 2011 for some reason. The film was filmed in parallel with "Anticipation", all the main actors involved in the first "Burnt by the Sun" took part in it: Nikita Mikhalkov as Kotov, Nadezhda Mikhalkov as his daughter Nadia, Oleg Menshikov as Mitya. Victoria Tolstoganova became the only new actress to play an already famous character. She tried on the image of Kotov's wife Marusya instead of Ingeborga Dapkunaite, who did not agree to the director's demand to refuse to participate in the reality show Big Brother for filming.
Preparing for "Citadel" took the actors a lot of time and demanded a certain amount of courage and diligence from each. Nadezhda Mikhalkova, whose heroine becomes an employee of the medical unit in the war, did an internship at the Burdenko hospital, learning to open ampoules with medicine with one hand. Dmitry Dyuzhev, who played a Belarusian, took lessons in the Belarusian language. And Victoria Tolstoganova hurriedly got into shape after giving birth, since during the filming she managed to become a mother twice and become pregnant with a third baby.
The film was shot both in the pavilions of Mosfilm, where Kotov's dacha was built, and on location, mainly in Gorokhovets, on the Klyazma River, where a bridge, a church (later blown up in the frame) and a hundred-meter citadel were built.
