Rating :   63/100                                                                                        88 Min

A documentary focusing on several Muscovites that lived through the dissolution of the Soviet Union and asking them to compare living now in modern day Russia, with living and going to school under communism. They were all classmates and all experienced the attempted coup in 1991 by party hardliners, with some of them taking part in the demonstrations against it. It’s really interesting listening to their comments on the before and after, with some of them laughing in almost disbelief at some of the things they used to take for granted under the heavy Soviet indoctrination, and yet others pointing out that so long as you turned up for work and were not an alcoholic then you had a job for life and didn’t have to worry about being fired, and so on. The discussion is fascinating, but apart from interviews with the same handful of people and the mixing in of archival footage (a lot of which contains the interviewees, possibly why they were chosen for the project) the film doesn’t really do much else, so it remains nothing more than a social snapshot, albeit still a worthwhile one.

(The title translates as ‘My Reconstruction’ or ‘My Rebuilding’)