When the USSR broke apart in 1991, a generation of young people faced a new realm of possibilities. An intimate epic about the extraordinary lives of this last Soviet generation, Robin Hessman's feature documentary debut tells the stories of five Moscow schoolmates who were brought up behind the Iron Curtain, witnessed the joy and confusion of glasnost, and reached adulthood right as the world changed around them. Through candid first-person testimony, revealing verité footage, and vintage home movies, Hessman, who spent many years living in Moscow, reveals a Russia rarely ever seen on film, where people are frank about their lives and forthcoming about their country. Engaging, funny, and positively inspiring, in MY PERESTROIKA politics is personal, honesty overshadows ideology, and history progresses one day, one life at a time.
- Director: Robin Hessman
- Country: USA | UK | Russia
- Genre: Documentary | Biography | Family
- Year: 2011
- Run Time: 01:27:37
- imdb Score: 7.8/10 (91 votes)
- Language: Russian
- Rating: Not Rated
- Cast:
Joshua Rothkopf - TIME OUT NEW YORK
"My Perestroika gives you a privileged sense of learning the history of a place not from a book but from the people who lived it. Watching it is a little like attending a party in an unfamiliar city and discovering the place's secrets from the guests. 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
Sundance Film Festival 2010
New Directors/New Films NY 2010
Hot Docs Toronto 2010
São Paulo Int'l Film Festival 2010
Bergen Int'l Film Festival 2010
Doha Tribeca Film Festival 2010
Int'l Film Festival Rotterdam 2011
and more...