My Perestroika
Director: Robin Hessman
Logline: My Perestroika tells the story of the last generation of Soviet children brought up behind the Iron Curtain. Just coming of age when the USSR collapsed, they witnessed the world of their childhood crumble and change beyond recognition.
Synopsis: Tracking the lives of five childhood classmates, the film explores how Communism’s crossover children are adjusting to their post-Soviet reality in Moscow’s booming metropolis. At first glance, for today’s Russians, their lives are completely different from how they would have lived in the USSR. They are the new and invisible middle class – 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 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 70s 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 disillusionments of this generation in Moscow today.