FILM: My Perestroika

Summary: When the USSR broke apart in 1991, a generation of young people faced a new realm of possibilities. 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 seen on film. Winner of the CDS Filmmaker Award at the 2010 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

DOCUMENTARY, ADJECTIVE retrospective will feature documentary films from Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania and Croatia.

Bio: This retrospective is part of the new Ackland Film Forum.

This retrospective presents several films by contemporary documentary filmmakers indicative of trends in East European non-fiction cinema in the last twenty years. The films in the program strike many interesting formal and thematic directions, such as concepts of national identity, political power, historical memory, representation of war, freedom, and family rituals.

The intent is not to present these films as a cohesive series of responses of one generation to the transformation of the former East Bloc into independent states. After all, what once constituted the geopolitical construct “Eastern Europe,” now consists of societies of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, each capable of producing a distinct cinematic tradition. This is as true of filmmakers before 1989 and those today.

In that sense, the primary goal of the retrospective is not to present these films as sources of factual information about East Europe, but rather as intersections of creative expression and documentary practice. The audience’s attention, in return, is drawn to the limits of abstracting meaning from particular social contexts and to the equivocal historical function of moving image forms. Hence the choice of the title: “Documentary, adjective.” Documentary, as a caveat and contingency.

Location: Toy Lounge, Dey Hall

Sponsors: Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature ; Ackland Art Museum; Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill