Perestroika

Slava Tsukerman directed this visually striking story of a man whose past is taking him on an emotional roller-coaster ride. Sasha Greenberg (Sam Robards) is an astrophysicist who left the Soviet Union in 1975 to defect to the United States and ended up designing nuclear weapons for the American military. In 1992, after Communism has fallen and the USSR has collapsed, Greenberg returns to Russia for the first time, and while his visit is prompted by an invitation to speak at a conference on physics, he’s soon occupied with catching up with the friends he left behind. Greenberg crosses paths with Professor Gross (F. Murray Abraham), his former teacher and intellectual sparring partner, who followed a curiously similar path, turning his back on the United States to design weapons in the Soviet Union. Several of Greenberg’s sweethearts also happen to be on hand, including Helen (Ally Sheedy), an astrophysicist from the United States, Natasha (Oksana Stashenko), a fellow scientist from Russia, and Jill (Jicky Schnee), an activist filmmaker. As Greenberg ponders his present and his past, his imagination carries him back and forth through his life, leading him to a state of mental chaos as Russia begins to move toward a new revolution. Perestroika was an official selection at the 2009 BFI London Film Festival.