My Perestroika - A Documentary Film by Robin Hessman

DVD Purchase

DVD for Educational and Institutional Use

We are distributing My Perestroika via NEW DAY FILMS (the only distribution company owned and run by independent filmmakers themselves.)

If you are interested in screening My Perestroika at a conference, annual meeting, or if you’d like to invite filmmaker Robin Hessman to your campus to speak about the film, please contact us at info@myperestroika.com.

To order a DVD for your institution or library:
Visit New Day Films, or call New Day Films toll free at 1 (888) 367-9154.

Relevant Topics Include:
● 20th Century History ● Anthropology ● Capitalism ● Cold War ● Communism ● Culture ● Democracy ● Economics ● Film Studies ● Free Markets ● Freedom of Speech ● Foreign Policy ● Glasnost ● Humanities ● International Relations ● Media Literacy ● National Heritage / Identity● Nuclear Arms Race ●Oral History ● Political Science ● Propaganda ● Psychology ● Russia ● Russian Language ● Sociology ● Soviet Union (USSR)

Here’s what some professors have said about My Perestroika:

“My Perestroika offers intriguing insights into the late years of the Soviet Union, the challenges of post-Soviet social and economic flux, and the unique nature of contemporary Russian life. It is at once both an intimate drama and an historical, sociological, and anthropological study on an epic scale.

—Jennifer Siegel, Associate Professor of History, The Ohio State University

“This is a beautiful film, visually and emotionally. Through the lives of five ordinary Muscovites we see one of the most dramatic events of recent history — the end of the Soviet Union. By juxtaposing materials from two epochs – the Soviet past and the post-Soviet present – the film constructs a complex and poetic narrative that avoids the usual cold war stereotypes about the Soviet “other.” Made by a director with a keen ethnographic eye, this film will be of great use to college professors.”

—Alexei Yurchak, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

“My Perestroika is a terrific film for classroom use in courses on post-Soviet Russia. No other film documents so beautifully and vividly the effects of enormous social change on the lives of everyday Russians, together with amazing and instructive documentary footage. I included the film in my freshman seminar, “Russia after Communism,” along with a class visit from director Robin Hessman, and many students remarked that it was a high point in the course.”

—Andrea Lanoux, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Slavic Studies, Connecticut College

“MY PERESTROIKA is exactly the sort of film I want to teach late-Soviet and post-Soviet history with. Not a conventional documentary about events, but an intimate portrait of how people experience life in historical times. The individuals and families whose stories unfold in this compelling film take us back into Soviet childhoods and teenage years and forward through crises and upheavals to an uncertain present through conversations, memories, family snapshots, and home movies, but also remarkable archival footage of the times. Here is history as we want it to be for students: not dry facts, and not a reduction to one argument, but history as complex experience. Watching this film, I recalled my own conversations over the years with Russian friends around the kitchen table, over tea or vodka, about Soviet life as it affected lives. Now I can offer something like it to students. What a perfect text for stimulating our own conversations in the classroom.”
—Mark D. Steinberg, Professor, History Department, University of Illinois

“What does it mean to grow up in one world and—all the while remaining in the very same apartment—find yourself living in a wholly other world in which all the rules have changed? My Perestroika is a very human portrayal of an epic transition with no attempt at melodrama. This is a film that will be appreciated alike by scholars and students who are just learning names like “Lenin,” “Stalin,” and “Gorbachev.”
—Marci Shore, Associate Professor of History, Yale University

Home Video DVD

Will be available in 2012. Please sign up on our mailing list on the home page to be notified, or join us at www.facebook.com/myperestroika for updates.

You can already add My Perestroika to your Netflix queue. Thanks for your interest!