THE SAMANTHA SMITH PROJECT (51 min., 2005) is an experimental documentary framed by the historical narrative of Samantha Smith, the briefly-famous ten-year-old girl from Manchester Maine who became an instant media celebrity when she became then-Soviet premiere Yuri Andropov’s penpal at the height of the Cold War in 1983. The specificity of this historical moment is used to situate an exploration of larger themes including the relationship between documentary and staging, forms of collective and personal amnesia, the collision of Hollywood fantasy with real politics, and constructions of the “foreign.” Braiding together the story of Samantha Smith’s historic journey to the Soviet Union with a parallel personal narrative of travel to Russia fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, THE SAMANTHA SMITH PROJECT explores the aftermath of the Cold War and the contemporary Russian landscape while meditating on notions of forgetting, nostalgia, and the manufacturing and dismantling of political enemies.