Award Winning documentary MY PERESTROIKA opens in Toronto on Friday, December 2

Opens in Toronto on Friday, December 2, 2011

After winning awards and critical acclaim at festivals and theatrical engagements in over 80 U.S. markets, Robin Hessman’s “My Perestroika” opens in Canada beginning in Toronto on Friday, December 2, 2011.

When the USSR broke apart in 1991, a generation of young people faced a new realm of possibilities. An intimate epic about the extraordinary lives of this last Soviet generation, Robin Hessman’s feature documentary debut tells the stories of five Moscow schoolmates who were brought up behind the Iron Curtain, witnessed the joy and confusion of glasnost, and reached adulthood right as the world changed around them. Through candid first-person testimony, revealing verité footage, and vintage home movies, Hessman, who spent many years living in Moscow, reveals a Russia rarely ever seen on film, where people are frank about their lives and forthcoming about their country. Engaging, funny, and positively inspiring, in My Perestroika politics is personal, honesty overshadows ideology, and history progresses one day, one life at a time.

At the center of the film is the Meyerson family.

Borya and Lyuba are married and have a son, Mark. They are both history teachers at Moscow’s School #57. As we are drawn into the fabric of their everyday lives, we hear stories of two very different Soviet childhoods: Lyuba was a conformist who would salute the TV when the Soviet hymn played, while Borya preferred to subvert the system whenever possible.

Their childhood classmates provide their own perspectives.