MY PERESTROKIA
Twenty-years ago the Iron Curtain fell leaving a whole generation confused, optimistic, and hesitant. Robin Hessman’s feature documentary debut examines the tumultuous and fascinating transition and development of modern Russia. A nation that is now a key market for international business, luxury goods, and even McDonalds, Russia’s changes in the last two decades are innumerable, but Hessman focuses onto five individuals that give this formative time meaning and emotion.
“It not only evocatively captures the Russian spirit and the yearnings of a generation, but it also masterfully chronicles the historic collapse of the Soviet Union and its complex aftermath.”
-David Lewis, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“There are no dry talking heads, no droning lists of Soviet leaders and events, just raw experience.”
-Stephen Holden, NEW YORK TIMES
“The subjects, plainspoken and insightful, attempt to extract the objective lessons of the political past from their subjective fortunes.”
-Nick Pinkerton, VILLAGE VOICE
Using candid testimony, revealing verite footage, and vintage home movies, MY PERESTROKIA merges the private and public, the individual and the national, through the narratives of those who were brought up behind the Iron Curtain and matured just as the world around them drastically changed. Hessman crafts an extraordinary and intimate epic that unveils a side, or rather sides, of Russian society and culture that have rarely been represented. Engaging and funny, MY PERESTROKIA proves that politics is personal and that the experience of an individual is always more powerful than an ideology.
Directed by Robin Hessman. Unrated.
USA/UK/Russia, 2010, Digital Projection, 88 minutes, Color, Russian with English Subtitles.