Lyuba, a teacher who grew up during the collapse of the Soviet Union, is one of the Russians profiled in Robin Hessman's documentary My Perestroika.Lyuba, a teacher who grew up during the collapse of the Soviet Union, is one of the Russians profiled in Robin Hessman's documentary My Perestroika. (Hot Docs)

In 1991, Robin Hessman, an enterprising student at Brown University, packed her bags and went off to Russia looking for adventure. She stayed for eight years.

My Perestroika is about the Soviet Union's 'last generation,' and how the dissolution of communism thrust them into the wider world and tested their values.

She enrolled in Moscow’s legendary All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography, becoming one of the first Americans ever to do so. One of her school projects — created with co-director James Longley, a friend who also came to study film in Russia — was a short documentary about a Russian children’s home entitled Portrait of Boy with Dog. Hessman submitted the film to a festival, and it eventually went on to win an Academy Award in 1994 in the student category.

Hessman remained in Moscow after her graduation when she was offered a producing job for the Russian version of Sesame Street. Fluent in Russian, and with experience living in the country during the toughest years of the post-Soviet transition, she had the insight and mettle to tackle her latest film project, a portrait of the last generation to grow up under Soviet rule and come of age during the Gorbachev era.

The result is My Perestroika, a sensitive and moving portrait of five ordinary people caught up in what’s been called the Second Russian Revolution. A circle of former classmates all now in their 40s, the five describe their contrasting memories of a structured and protected Soviet childhood, and how the dissolution of communism thrust them into the wider world and tested their resourcefulness and values.

Hessman filmed them in their kitchens, their dachas (cottages), at the beauty salon, at a punk rock concert, with their kids and at their various jobs. She intercut these scenes with an astonishing cache of rare Soviet home movies from the 1970s and ’80s. The characters have a lot to say about what they’ve lost and gained in Russia today, and they do so with wisecracks and wisdom, as well as long, expressive drags on their cigarettes.

Liuba, a history teacher, laughs as she recounts how as a child, she was utterly uninterested in the West. When she’d see TV reports about shootings and protests in the West, she says she would think to herself, My God, I am so lucky I live in the Soviet Union! But by 1991, she had joined the demonstrations at the Russian White House, eager to defend her new freedoms against the Communist coup organizers. Today, she’s seen in lively exchanges with her son and husband in their tiny Moscow flat, happy but struggling economically. She watches Putin’s speeches on television with a wry expression, puffing an ever-present cigarette.

CBC News producer Jennifer Clibbon interviewed Robin Hessman about her film that was five years in the making.

Borya and his son Mark watch home movies of Boryas childhood in the 1970s in a scene from My Perestroika. Borya and his son Mark watch home movies of Boryas childhood in the 1970s in a scene from My Perestroika. (Hot Docs)

Q: Describe the premise of the film.

A: The film is about five people who grew up together in Moscow and represent the last generation of Soviet kids who grew up behind the Iron Curtain. They are a transition generation who had childhoods in the Soviet Union at a time when no one imagined anything would be any different. Then they were teenagers under Gorbachev going through their own periods of transition just as the country began to change so rapidly. They graduated from university just as the country collapsed and they had to figure out how to navigate a brand-new society with no models to follow.

The film is a story of all the years in transition, but through the very specific, personal point of view of five individuals who are very different. There is a businessman, a punk musician, a single mom who rents out billiard tables, and the heart of the film is the Mayerson family, a married couple who both teach history in a school in Moscow where their son goes.

Q: There have been many films about the Gorbachev era, and even about the youth culture of that period. What new insights do you bring?

A: For Western audiences, the personal view. The ability to feel that you are sitting at someone’s kitchen table in Moscow and hearing about their lives today.

It was very important for me to find a lot of home movies from the ’70s and ’80s, because the images that made it to the West through the Cold War were propaganda images for one side or the other; either people in breadlines or tanks in Red Square, or smiling peasants holding sheaths of wheat in tractors. You never saw the ordinary human stuff of daily life — what it was really like for people, the summers at the dacha or picking mushrooms, the intimate, the personal.

Q: How did you gather the home movies?

A: I was gathering through friends of friends. Someone would pass through a friend of a friend in the Metro a bag of films. Or someone would send them through their relatives off in Siberia in a train. I was asking anybody I knew. When I met Borya and Liuba Mayerson for the first time, after about two hours of conversation, I asked about the home movies, and Borya opened the closet and there they were. That was an incredible gift.

[His father] was an engineer. He was a fan [of making amateur movies]. He would develop them in the bathroom. He didn’t just film his own son. He would film all the kids on Communist cleanup day: the kids raking and cleaning the schoolroom and the assemblies.

Moscow businessman Andrei is among the subjects interviewed in My Perestroika. Moscow businessman Andrei is among the subjects interviewed in My Perestroika. (Hot Docs)

Q: How did you choose this group of friends to film?

A: As I was thinking of putting a structure or framework on this film, I thought about filming classmates. People in Russia go to school together from first grade to end of high school. That’s 10 or 11 years of intimately getting to know one another. They would have shared all of their primary childhood experiences; school and [communist youth group] Pioneers and all of that.

What was so wonderful about the five of them is they do have such different points of view. A lot of people think it was a monolithic, uniform experience in the Soviet Union. But Borya and Liuba grew up across the street from one another and had completely different interpretations. Borya was always trying to subvert the system; Liuba had never even thought to question it, and embraced it.

People ask, “How did Russians feel about the coup [of 1991]?” Well, in the coup section, we have Ruslan [the punk rocker] saying everybody was drinking and hanging around. Andrei [the businessman] said people only marched because there was no food in the stores. And Liuba saying she was bursting with feelings of freedom and excitement. It’s important to show that everybody has their own interpretations of it.

Q: Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin are like shadows in the film — they don’t feature prominently. Was this deliberate?

A: I wanted to only put politics in the film inasmuch as it affected the people in the film. Liuba argued with her mother about Lenin, and whether he was good or bad. For Olga, she was busy with her life.

I was aware that if I had been watching this from afar, I wouldn’t have understood how people were functioning with such colossal changes. How do you live with such immense ideological shifts? But as Olga says in the film, daily life still continues, regardless of whether Yeltsin fired his entire parliament that day.

There are moments, of course, like the coup, when real life just stops, and people took to the streets and were standing and arguing excitedly with strangers and didn’t know what would happen next. But for the most part, throughout the 1990s, it is in the background. By the time they started working and having families, even though it was upsetting how things were changing, and their hopes were draining away, they didn’t have the capability to do anything. They had lives to live, money to make, children to feed. The belief that ordinary people had the power to change anything was dissipating.

Q: One of your characters, Ruslan the punk rocker, says in Russia, “Nothing much has changed — just the décor.” Do you agree with that?

A: I agree that a lot less has changed than I expected. And things have changed back. In the mid 1990s, some television news stations were free and critical of the government. I’m deeply saddened by the control that has come back.

Maybe politically, less has changed than one would think. In society, there are such fundamental changes that are so powerful in individuals’ lives, such as travel and internet. People travel freely now. And there is freedom to the outside world. Many people speak English. Before, the Soviet Union was a closed-off country.

Q: The film hasn’t been shown in Russia yet. How have Russians who have seen it responded?

A: To my immense happiness, every Russian who has come up to me has expressed deeply how much it moved them and how it represented their experiences. That has been gratifying.

Q: You studied film in Russia in the 1990s at the prestigious All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. What was that like?

A: It is [legendary silent-era director Sergei] Eisenstein’s film school. What a gift! It was an incredible education. We got to work in 35 mm and edit on old flatbeds. In editing class, they would hand you cans of films to play with. There were eight movie theatres in the school, and when you had a free period, you could peek in and see what other classes were watching. I had a three-year literature class that went from antiquity to the 20th century — the kind of breadth and depth that I wasn’t getting in my American education.

My Perestroika plays at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto on May 8.

Jennifer Clibbon is a producer for CBC News.