My Perestroika Nominated for the Oscar Shortlist

Robin Hessman graduated from Brown University with a dual degree in Russian and Film. She received her graduate degree in film directing from the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow (with a “red diploma” of honors). She received an Academy Award® in 1994 – with co-director James Longley – for their student film, Portrait of Boy with Dog. During her eight years living in Russia, Robin worked for the Children’s Television Workshop as the on-site producer of Ulitsa Sezam, the original Russian-language Sesame Street.

In the US, Robin co-produced the documentary Tupperware!, which received the Peabody Award in 2005. Robin also co-produced the PBS biography of Julia Child, Julia! America’s Favorite Chef. In 2004, she founded Red Square Productions and was granted the position of Filmmaker in Residence at Boston’s PBS affiliate, WGBH, to develop My Perestroika. The project received the Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant at the Full Frame Festival for a work-in-progress. In 2008 Robin was a MacDowell Colony Fellow.

Her feature-length documentary directing debut, My Perestroika, premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival as part of the US Documentary competition and was screened in New York as part of the prestigious film series, New Directors/New Films, curated by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. It won the Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award at the Full Frame Festival in April 2010 and a Special Jury Award at Silverdocs in June 2010. My Perestroika will be broadcast on PBS on the independent series POV in their 2011 season and is a co-production of Red Square Productions, Bungalow Town Productions and ITVS International. The film has been supported by the Sundance Documentary Fund, the Ford Foundation, Chicken and Egg Pictures, the LEF Moving Image Fund, YLE Finland, and others.

Robin is also an Associate of Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian Studies and is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Since 2006, Robin has served as the Director of documentary programming for Amfest, the American Film Festival in Moscow.

ABOUT HER PRODUCTION TEAM

Rachel Wexler – Producer

Rachel Wexler runs Bungalow Town Productions in the UK with her partner, director/producer Jez Lewis. She specializes in producing international feature documentaries for a worldwide audience. She has worked with many award-winning filmmakers including Geoffrey Smith (The English Surgeon), Marc Isaacs (All White in Barking, Men of the City), and Oliver Hodge (Garbage Warrior). She has produced films with support from broadcasters and funders around the world including ITVS, BBC Storyville, Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, More4 True Stories, Sundance Channel, DRTV, YLE, NRK, and the UK Film Council. Films that Rachel has produced have been screened at many of the world’s leading festivals, among them Sundance, Edinburgh, London, Karlovy Vary, Hotdocs, Silverdocs, and Vancouver.

Alla Kovgan – Editor

Born in Moscow, Alla Kovgan is a Boston-based filmmaker. Films that she directed and codirected have been presented at festivals worldwide, including the Sundance Film Festival, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Montreal Film Festival, and numerous others. She edited and co-directed the documentary feature Traces of the Trade which premiered at Sundance 2008 and opened the 20th season of POV on PBS. In 2009, together with David Hinton, she directed the award-winning short film Nora, based on the life of Zimbabwean-born dancer Nora Chipaumire. Since 1999, Alla has been involved with interdisciplinary collaborations – creating intermedia performances (with KINODANCE Company), dance films (with Alissa Cardone, Victoria Marks and Nicola Hawkins), and documentaries about dance such as Movement (R)evolution Africa (with Joan Frosch). Since 2000, she has taught and curated dance film/avant-garde cinema worldwide and also acts as a curator of the St. Petersburg Dance Film Festival KINODANCE (Russia) and as a co-curator of the Balagan Film Series (Boston).

Garret Savage – Editor

Garret Savage’s work spans a variety of formats including documentaries, fiction features, film trailers, short films, and television commercials. His documentary editing credits include Paper or Plastic? (retitled Ready, Set, Bag!; Los Angeles Film Festival 2008), Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern’s End of America, and an episode of the forthcoming HBO documentary series My American Dream. Other editing credits include the fiction feature Olympia (Slamdance, Sundance Channel) as well as projects for a variety of networks and studios including Paramount Pictures, ABC/ESPN, Discovery, WE, MTV, and the Style Network. He has directed and edited numerous award-winning shorts and in 2005 he was profiled as one of The Independent magazine’s “Top Short Filmmakers.” His rural documentary, 4-Cylinder 400, continues to be broadcast on the Independent Film Channel. As an educator, he was the Program Director of the Nantucket Film Festival’s Teen View Film Lab and a mentor with the Reel Works Teen Filmmaking Program in Brooklyn.

Pressreviews:

Robin Hessman’s intimate and lovely documentary … follows five classmates who came of age right before the Iron Curtain fell – the children of a vanished world. Charting the ways that time, memory, and a rapidly changing society have affected their lives, it’s playful, insightful, hypnotic, and, ultimately, superb.”
– Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine

(Chose My Perestroika as one of the “Twenty Very Best Movies at Sundance”)
“…profoundly insightful and overall stupendous …. My Perestroika must be considered one of the year’s best documentaries.”
- Stewart Nusbaumer, The Huffington Post

“…an intimate epic…..never fails to be engrossing”
– David Lewis, San Francisco Chronicle

“Robin Hessman’s debut feature is a documentary of considerable charm and nonjudgmental insight…Home movies and vintage propaganda footage fill out this lovingly crafted pic’s engrossing progress.”
– Denis Harvey, VARIETY

“Remarkably candid…. full of surprises”
– Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times

About the Film:

MY PERESTROIKA follows five ordinary Russians living in extraordinary times — from their sheltered Soviet childhood, to the collapse of the Soviet Union during their teenage years, to the constantly shifting political landscape of post-Soviet Russia. Together, these childhood classmates paint a complex picture of the dreams and disillusionments of those raised behind the Iron Curtain.

My Perestroika follows five ordinary Russians living in extraordinary times – from their sheltered Soviet childhood, to the collapse of the Soviet Union during their teenage years, to the constantly shifting political landscape of post-Soviet Russia.

At the center of the film is a family. Borya and Lyuba are married and have a son, Mark. They are both history teachers at a Moscow school. As we are drawn into the fabric of their everyday lives, we hear stories of two very different Soviet childhoods: Lyuba was a conformist who would salute the TV when the Soviet hymn played, while Borya, living with the consequences of being Jewish, preferred to subvert the system whenever possible.

Their childhood classmates provide their own perspectives. Andrei has thrived in the new Russian capitalism and has just opened his 17th store of expensive French men’s shirts.

Olga, the prettiest girl in the class, is a single mother and works for a company that rents out billiard tables to bars and clubs all over Moscow. Ruslan was a famous Russian punk rock musician who now plays the banjo in the metro for money.

At first glance, in today’s Russia, everything is different from the lives they would have lived in the USSR. They are the invisible “ordinary” people of Moscow – raising their own children in a world they couldn’t have imagined in their wildest dreams. But have those changes ultimately proved to be only superficial?

In this film, there are no “talking head” historians, no expert witnesses, no omniscient narrator telling viewers how to interpret events. Instead, Borya, Lyuba, Andrei, Olga and Ruslan share their personal stories. They were the last generation of Soviet children brought up behind the Iron Curtain. They take us on a journey through their Soviet childhoods, their youth during the country’s huge changes of Perestroika, and let us into their present-day lives.

The film interweaves their contemporary world with rare home movie footage from the 1970s and ‘80s in the USSR, along with official Soviet propaganda films that surrounded them at the time. Their memories and opinions sometimes complement each other and sometimes contradict each other, but together they paint a complex picture of the challenges, dreams, and disillusionment of this generation in Moscow today.

The Bolshevik revolution, the cold war, and the collapse of the Soviet Union defined the history of the twentieth century. With such a past, what does it mean to be Russian today? Robin Hessman's lovingly crafted documentary, My Perestroika, adopts the idea of the “everyman story,” suggesting that the unheralded lives of the last generation of Soviets to grow up behind the iron curtain hold the key to understanding the contradictions of modern Russia from the inside out.

Crafted during five years of researching and shooting, and based on almost a decade of living in Russia in the 1990s, Hessman's film poetically interweaves an extraordinary trove of home movies, Soviet propaganda films, and intimate access to five schoolmates whose linked, but very different, histories offer a moving portrait of newly middle-class Russians.