POV'S "MY PERESTROIKA" TRACKS
CLASSMATES FROM SOVIET CHILDHOODS TO PUTIN'S RUSSIA
~ An Era of Dramatic
Historical Change Rendered in Vivid Detail as Five Muscovites
Recount Personal Stories and Old Ideals Shift to New
Realities ~
June 2011
A rare account of the collapse
of the Soviet Union as experienced by five members of
the last generation of Soviet children, Robin Hessman's
MY PERESTROIKA has its national broadcast premiere
on Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 10:00 p.m. on PBS as part
of the 24th season of POV (Check local listings).
Woven from nearly 200 hours
of footage of former Russian schoolmates filmed from
2005 to 2008, hundreds of reels of home movies from
the 1970s and 1980s and dozens of Soviet propaganda
films of the era, MY PERESTROIKA is a nuanced
account of a tumultuous time - the last years of the
Soviet system - as experienced by a generation coming
of age just as its country broke apart. The film is
also an affecting portrait of the paths five young people
took when their world turned upside down.
Five classmates go from living
sheltered childhoods to experiencing the hopes of Gorbachev's
reforms and the confusion of the USSR's dissolution,
to searching for their places in today's Moscow. With
candor and humor, the punk rocker, single mother, entrepreneur,
and married teachers paint a picture of the challenges,
dreams and disappointments of those raised behind the
Iron Curtain. Through first-person testimony, verité
footage and vintage home movies, this beautifully crafted
documentary reveals a Russia rarely seen on film.
You will meet Lyuba and Borya,
both history teachers at Moscow School No. 57, who tell
stories of two very different childhoods: Lyuba, the
follower, once saluted the television when the Soviet
anthem played, while Borya, preferred to subvert the
system whenever possible; single mother Olga, who lives
just above the official poverty level in her childhood
apartment with her sister and their adult children and
works for a company that rents out billiard tables to
Moscow clubs; Andrei has been successful in the new
Russia. He just opened his 17th store selling exclusive
French men's shirts and ties and lives in a luxury condo,
but is impatient with the fact that Russia has not yet
become a Western, European-style society; and Ruslan,
who rose to fame in the 1990s as a member of the wildly
popular punk rock group NAIV, but as the music world
became dependent on consumer culture, he quit the group
in disgust at what he felt was its commercialization.
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