In Hollywood's hands, orphans are usually cute and cuddly, filled with boundless energy and determination, ready to break into song at a moment's notice. Even the orphan movies I don’t like have a happy ending.

It doesn't sound as if "12", a Russian movie that opened last week in Moscow, is that kind of movie. The central character is a boy from Chechnya, the region in southwest Russia that has been fighting to secede from Russia. He is an orphan, his parents having been killed in the fighting. And he is on trial for murder--the murder of the Russian soldier who adopted him.

The movie is the work of Nikita Mikhalkov, who won an Oscar in 1994 for Best Foreign Film with "Burnt By the Sun". Russians are well-acquainted with his movies, such as "At Home Among Strangers, Stranger at Home", as well as with his creative family (his father wrote the words to the Soviet national anthem). If you follow Hollywood movies, you might recognize his brother, the director Andrei Konchalovsky. Mikhalkov acted in a movie his brother made, "Sibiriade."

According to the critics who have seen "12" (I haven't and I don't know when or if it is coming to the United States), the movie borrows its structure--young killer, conflicted jury--from "12 Angry Men", the Sidney Lumet classic that celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. But rather than just create a Russian-language remake, Mikhalkov has tackled one of the most divisive episodes in recent Russian history, the wars in Chechnya.

"It's not a remake," Mikhalkov was quoted as telling one reporter. "That film is about the triumph of American law and about the importance of finding truth in the most complicated life circumstances. Our picture is about how a Russian person can't live according to the law."

Chechnya has been under Russian rule since the late 1700s and it has rebelled many times against it. But Mikhalkov's movie focuses on the war that lasted from 1994 to 1996, a war that would prove to be something of a Waterloo for then Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Thousands of Russian and Chechen soldiers died, along with tens of thousands of civilians. Children were orphaned, but perhaps because of the continuing unrest in Chechnya, I can find no American adoption agencies with programs there.

Though Russia does not have a jury system like ours in the U.S., Mikhalkov has given it one in this movie and made his 12 jurors a cross-section of Russia today: a wealthy entrepreneur, a successful surgeon, a TV entertainer, a Jewish intellectual and a racist supporter of nationalist politics among others. Their debate draws in not just the facts of the trial, but many of the facts of life in Russia now. And in the end, the movie is much more about those facts than it is about being an orphan.

The reviewers don't give away the film's ending, and I'm just as glad; I may want to see this if it comes to America. "12" won a Special Lion award for Overall Work at the Venice International Film Festival in early September.

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