My Life – My Perestroika

Today, I saw My Perestroika at the IFC movie theater in Village, following appearance of its director Robin Hessman. What an amazing documentary – every word, episode, old video clips from home archives made unbelievably realistic chronicle of my life and my friends’ lives over there. I’ve been always puzzled – how can Russian brilliance in art, ballet, music, literature, poetry, science can live in parallel with the every day reality of ordinary people and corrupted government. “I wanted to show how complicated it is for a society, and how complicated it is for an individual, to make this transition,” says Robin Hessman of her documentary “My Perestroika”– hailed by the NY Times as “an arresting visual scrapbook of the Soviet period.”