A ’7 Up’ Series for Russia, With Soviet Roots

“Born in the USSR” is an award-winning documentary series that started out as the Soviet version of British director Michael Apted’s “7 Up,” the project that has followed a group of children starting at age 7 and checked in with them every seven years.
Mr. Apted chose Sergei Miroshnichenko, who had been expelled from film school in Moscow in the 1970s and sent to Sverdlovsk, then a closed military-industrial city, to direct the Soviet series in the late 1980s and he has been with the project ever since. That includes the latest installment, which is screening (with English subtitles) on Friday at Tribeca Cinemas as part of the sixth annual Russian Documentary Film Festival.
“Of course, this is a daughter of Michael Apted’s project,” Mr. Miroshnichenko said by phone as he headed to the airport for his Moscow-to-New York flight. (He will participate in a post-screening question-and-answer session.) “But she has grown and gone a bit on her own path,” shaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its reverberations. Mr. Miroshnichenko has two daughters who were young children when the project began and now work on it with him.

The second installment of “Born in the USSR” won an International Emmy Award for best documentary in 1999. The project almost fell apart for lack of money after the Soviet collapse until British financing was found. The bulk of the budget for the latest installment, which cost about $1 million, came from a mix of private Russian sponsors, Russian government entities and British and German partners.

The series is full of echoes of the past and foreshadows of events to come, giving it a Tolstoyan depth. It also has a geographical sweep — its subjects are now spread across the former Soviet states and around the world (in Israel, Argentina, Europe and the United States) — that distinguishes it from “My Perestroika,” an acclaimed 2010 documentary. That film, by an American, Robin Hessman, took a look at a group of 40-something Muscovites who spent half their lives in the Soviet Union and now live in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

“Born in the USSR” follows 18 subjects. Among them is Anton, who is from an elite family of journalists, including a grandfather who was an editor of the Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda. At age 7 in 1990 he was asked what he thought awaited the Soviet Union. At the time, he spoke with earnest prescience as he predicted, “There will probably be a coup.”

Fast-forward to 2011, and Anton is a 28-year-old yuppie working as an editor at the Russian edition of Men’s Health magazine, churning out stories about sex and openly disenchanted with Russian politics. He is concerned primarily with creating a safe, comfortable and moral life for his wife and two young children. Just a few months later, young Moscow professionals like him would join mass anti-government protests.

Another subject of “Born in the USSR,” Andrei, was orphaned as a boy and by the second series had been adopted in the United States. But his first adoptive mother rejected him, and he was taken in by another family. In an on-camera statement, he refused to participate in the latest series. Mr. Miroshnichenko said that he hoped to film Andrei again later and made it clear that he did not support the official Russian ban on adoption by Americans.

Surprisingly, the film was shown on the Kremlin-controlled Rossiya state channel, even though Mr. Miroshnichenko asked one of his subjects whether Russia would survive as a country, a question now asked frequently in Russia but also often officially taboo.

“It was filmed before Bolotnaya,” he said referring to the site of major demonstrations in late 2011 and early 2012. “But you can already feel that people are unhappy about things. People had reason to be unhappy. I think that people who are always happy with everything are foolish people or deluded.”
from "The New York Times" blogs

Lucky we are, with all the series of this amazing film on YouTube. I've seen and liked them and totally recommend.

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