My Perestroika

My Perestroika
Film poster
Directed by	Robin Hessman
Release dates	January 24, 2010 (2010-01-24) (Sundance)[1] March 23, 2011 (2011-03-23)
Running time	90 minutes
Country	United States
Language	Russian with English subtitles

My Perestroika is a 2010 American

There is no single narrator in the film. Instead, the stories are told by five inhabitants of Moscow, four of whom grew up together and were classmates from primary school through high school.

Borya and Lyuba are a married couple and history teachers at a Moscow school. Andrei has thrived in the new Russian capitalism and has just opened a new store of 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 rejects society's structures.

Some of the topics that come up are conformity and rebellion, the attitudes towards the USSR and its collapse, the benefits and challenges of the transition to contemporary Russia, and the difference between the older and the younger generations.

To tell these stories, Hessman combines first-person recollections, often filmed at the homes of the five protagonists, with home movies from the 1970s and 1980s, canonical Soviet and Russian music, and Soviet archival footage.

Production

Hessman spent about a decade living in Russia. She had lived in Russia in the 1990s, completing an MFA degree in Film Directing at the

Release

The film premiered at the

The film has met with positive reception from critics and viewers. It has a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes[7] and 90% on Metacritic.^[8] It became the #3 Best Critic Reviewed Movie of 2011 on Metacritic.

See also

• Perestroika

References

External links

• My Perestroika at
  IMDb
• Home << My Perestroika - Documentary Film My Perestroika - Documentary Film
• P.O.V. series webpage