User:Ka Faraq Gatri/sandbox5

My Perestroika is a 2010 documentary film that covers the childhoods of five Russians raised in the final years of the Soviet Union and examines the effects of the Dissolution on their lives.

Synopsis
Lyuba, Borya, Ruslan, Olga, Andrei The film incorporates current day interviews, images from historic news reports, propaganda reels and home movie footage shot by Borya's father. The film does not use academics or "talking-head experts" and does not have a narrator.

Four out of the five attended the same school.

At the centre of the film are Lyuba and Borya, a married couple who have a son. They teach history.

Andrei is head of the Russian arm of Café Coton, a French shirt and tie company.

Ruslan busks on the Moscow Metro. He used to be in a punk rock band (NAIV) but left because he felt it was becoming too commercialised.

Olga was the prettiest girl in the class when the group were at school. Today she is a single mother who rents out pool tables for a living and shares her accommodation with her sister and her sister's son.

Lyuba and Borya are uneasy about the new history textbooks brought in after the 2008 election from which they are expected to teach.

My Perestroika was shot over three years, part of which included the Russian presidential election, 2008. The original footage was over 190 hours.

My Perestroika is Robin Hessman's first documentary film.

Response
My Perestroika was well received by the critics, being rated as a 90% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes based on 21 reviews and 92 out of 100 by Metacritic based on 8 reviews. A number of reviewers found My Perestroika to be reminiscent of Michael Apted’s Up series of documentaries which have revisited the same group of British individuals every seven years since their childhoods. Michael Johnson, a former Moscow correspondent for the Associated Press currently working for the American Spectator, said, "this film gets inside the Russian mind better than any other documentary has managed". David Lewis of the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a distinctly Russian-flavored mix of nostalgia and disillusionment that never fails to be engrossing."

The distributors were surprised at the level of interest in the film. Lyuba and Borya were flown to Washington DC to attend a colloqium about the film held at the National Gallery of Art.