As a child, Robin Hessman had an insatiable curiosity about the "Evil Empire" and ended up leaving for Moscow in her freshman year of college, soon joining the throngs of protesters who stood firm against the attempted military coup of August 1991 and freed Russia from Soviet rule. Hessman would stay in the country for almost a decade, finishing film school, making short films, and working as a producer of "Ulitsa Sezam," Russia's version of "Sesame Street." Now, in her first feature film, "My Perestroika," Hessman uses archival footage, home movies, and interviews to tell the stories of five former classmates in Moscow who came of age as the USSR was falling apart. It's currently playing at New York's IFC Center and opens at Sunset 5 in Los Angeles on April 15. ARTINFO sat down with the filmmaker to talk about Soviet childhoods, connections to the Middle Eastern uprisings, and what reframing "Sesame Street" for Russian kids entailed.

Your film is based on the stories of five people who were young adults at the time of perestroika, the period of economic and social reform and increased openness that was inaugurated by Gorbachev. You seem to have purposely stayed away from academic or policy experts in order to show ordinary people. Why did you adopt this approach?

Because I feel that there have been several good films, and there's been work out in the world where academics and experts and scholars analyze and contextualize and summarize events that were happening in the Soviet Union and in Russia, but there wasn't much of an opportunity for people to hear the actual direct voices and opinions of the people who lived through the time, and it just seemed like something that was missing.

What inspired you to focus your film on younger Russians, rather than the older generation that had lived through years of Soviet rule?
 

The idea originally was to tell the story of this transition generation, which is more or less my generation. I lived in Russia for almost a decade in the 90s, and the people in the film are about five years older than me. This generation is fascinating in that they had completely normal Soviet childhoods, and never had an inkling that anything would change. They were coming of age just as Gorbachev arrived on the scene and they graduated from college just when the country collapsed. So they were kind of on the cusp of adulthood, and had a very good idea of what their professional, adult lives would be like in the Soviet Union, but they never got to actually live those adult lives that they had been prepared for. They graduated from school and were thrust into this new independent, democratic Russia where the entire economy and structure of society had changed overnight and had to figure out how to navigate with no models to follow. A generation is such a large concept that I thought a good framework to put on it would be classmates. In the Soviet Union — and still in Russia today — you are basically with the same 20-25 people from the moment you start first grade until the moment you graduate from high school. That's a pretty strong connection.

Do you think these five people are representative of a cross-section
of the Russian population, or did they just have compelling stories to
tell?

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The film takes place in Moscow, and Moscow is to Russia as New York is to America, so I don't think the five of them are representative of Russians throughout the entire country as a whole. Perhaps they are representative of their generation up through 1991, since education was pretty much the same and there were a lot of shared experiences. In a sense it's even akin to how in the 70s we had more of a shared media experience because there were three major networks and now everything's so fragmented. There was a lot more shared throughout the entire Soviet Union before '91 than after, culturally and technologically as well as politically.

How did you choose the film's subjects?

The five of them are all very different, and that was important to me. Growing up here in America during the end of the Cold War I was given the impression that everyone in the Soviet Union believed the same thing, that it was this big gray monolith, so it was important to me to find people with different points of view. In the end it turned out to be the easiest thing in the world. Once I found the first ones, the five classmates having different points of view evolved very naturally.

Have the people you interviewed seen the film and have they told you what they think of it?

Borya and Lyuba Meyerson are really the heart of the film — they're the people I spent the most time with and as history teachers they have a different way of going into the story of the country and tying it into their emotional experiences and their past. Lyuba, for instance, has this really lovely way of looking at herself in the past with a kind of kind and amused approach, because she's really the one of the five of them that changed the most. She believed everything she was told in school and was having screaming fights with her mother about whether Lenin was good or bad and was just shocked to find out that the Baltic states didn't enthusiastically jump and volunteer to join the Soviet Union, so she was really the one who really did have the biggest kind of transformation about her understanding of the world. And so it was incredible, really — and really gratifying — that they loved the film and they're very proud to have been in it. They feel like it's an important testimony for future generations, and they came out to Sundance for the world premiere.

Did you discover any parallels between their upbringing in the former Soviet Union and your own upbringing in the U.S.?

I basically lived in Russia between the ages of 18 and 27, so I have to go back and think back to the me when everything was new, since then this other huge chunk of my life really was the same as theirs. I suppose that one similarity is that we were both taught very similar things by our governments about the other country. In the film there's this one archival piece that I love where little Soviet kids are telling Reagan how the Soviet Union wants peace and he shouldn't want nuclear war — which, of course, is exactly what we were told, that we're the peace-loving country and they're the ones that want nuclear war. So, for Americans in the audience, the similarities have been striking in that everything that we were told they were told also.

Do you think that your film has special resonance at a time of political upheaval across the Middle East?

I hope so, and I do think so, because I certainly remember for myself being 18 and standing on Palace Square surrounded by tens of thousands of people during the coup in 1991: the dreams and hopes and expectations when everything turned out for the best, when our side won, and the belief that the borders won't be closed again and everything is going to move forward. And I think that the hopes and dreams and expectations after this kind of political upheaval do have to run smack into the difficulties in transforming a society, whatever the society may be. It's now been 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and there are some things that have changed absolutely for the better, and there are other things that have changed very differently than imagined. I do think that the film can provide a window into a possibility of outcomes in some of the countries right now that are undergoing upheaval. This kind of transition is never as easy as in the moment of euphoria and joy in the square that the people there imagine it to be. I'd love to see a film that someone makes in Egypt twenty years from now.

I have to ask you about producing "Ulitsa Sezam," the Russian-language "Sesame Street." Did the show stay very close to the American original?

It was wonderful. The show is one of the international co-productions which meant that a completely new curriculum was written for Russia. We created three new Muppets, together with the Henson company, but with the Russian production team designing them and coming up with their personalities. It was about 50 percent original production and 50 percent segments from "Sesame Street" in the States — carefully selected ones that would fit the Russian show. There was a bit of a generation gap and struggle between people over 40 and people under 40, struggles between "should we have the famous Soviet composer write something or the rock group that is playing in the club tomorrow?" And so there were a lot of really juicy moments of evaluating what Russian culture is, because so many things were changing so quickly.