My Perestroika

Eavesdropping around a kitchen table in Moscow these days, two decades after the Kremlin supposedly lifted the gates, invariably reveals ordinary lives swept up by the pathos of history yet anxiously awaiting the new hurly-burly of modern Russia.

This prize-winning feature documentary debut from American Robin Hessman, 38, who taught school in Russia for six years, is an intimate look exploring a generation that came of age after the fall of the USSR in 1991. Its complicated transition from life before and after is told in the stories of five Moscovite schoolmates raised under the shadow of the Iron Curtain. Revealing a rarely seen Russia through candid testimony, verité and vintage footage, home movies and song, Hessman’s scrapbook tells engaging, funny, and frank stories (which she shot herself) of history’s day-to-day progression and the way in which radical changes veer on personal memories of once-happy childhoods going into a bright, propagandistic future.

Winner of Silverdocs Special Jury Award and Full Frame Filmmaker Award. 

Print Source: International Film Circuit, Wendy Lidell, wlidell@internationalfilmcircuit.com