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 footage and vintage home movies, Hessman, who spent many years living in Moscow, reveals a Russia rarely seen on film, where people are frank about their lives and forthcoming about their country. Engaging, funny and positively inspiring, MY PERESTROIKA shows that politics are personal, honesty overshadows ideology and history progresses one day, one life at a time.

This New York Times Critics Pick premiered at Sundance Film Festival2010, and went on to win the Filmmaker Award at Full Frame Film Festival and the Special Jury Award at Silverdocs.

Childhood nostalgia is universal, even if you were raised under Communist rule. "The sun was brighter, the grass was greener, the sky was bluer, and everything somehow seemed better," reflects one of the subjects in this award-winning documentary, which profiles five ordinary Russian thirtysomethings who came of age during a time of epochal upheaval, the fall of the Soviet Union. American director Robin Hessman, who lived for eight years in Moscow, where she produced the Russian incarnation of Sesame Street, chose her subjects well: married schoolteachers, a single mother (once "the prettiest girl in class"), a successful clothing entrepreneur, and, perhaps most surprising, a former punk rocker. Intimate and candid interviews topple western perceptions of Russians that were reinforced by footage of spectacular rallies in which propaganda-spouting children ("We live in the land of happy childhood") marched in step. These Russians have an equally skewed image of westerners that was shaped by media images of American crime (in America, one offers, "everything is measured in money"). You don't have to be Russian or possess a degree in Russian history to be compelled by My Perestroika. Hopes, dreams, and disillusionment are universal, too.