director's statement

In 1983, at the height of the Cold War nuclear arms race, Samantha Smith, a ten-year-old girl from the small town of Manchester, Maine, wrote a letter to former Soviet president Yuri Andropov pleading for a peaceful resolution to US-Soviet tensions. Her heartfelt and naïve letter quickly became the unexpected centerpiece of a propaganda whirlwind. Not only was the letter published both in the US and in Pravda, but also President Andropov personally answered the letter, proclaiming his commitment to world peace, and inviting Samantha to be the first American girl to visit the Soviet Union. The very first in a line of child diplomats sent across the Iron Curtain, Samantha’s story became an international headline and more importantly, powerful propaganda that marked the beginning of the denouement of the Cold War. Using the Samantha Smith story as a point of departure, The Samantha Smith Project is an essay film that uses a historical moment to frame a broader investigation US foreign policy and the manufacturing and dismantling of “enemies” to advance political agendas (an investigation newly relevant in a charged climate of post-9/11 xenophobia).

The film braids together the story of Samantha Smith’s historic journey to the Soviet Union in 1983 (as a "child diplomat" and official guest of her high profile “pen pal” in the Kremlin, then-Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov) with a parallel personal narrative of travel to Russia: in 1989, I was a participant in a pilot exchange program with a Soviet high school (part of a government initiative that was explicitly connected to Samantha Smith’s legacy of child diplomacy). My family hosted a Soviet high school student for a month, and later in the year, I spent a month living in Moscow during the euphoric high point of Gorbachev's Glastnost era. Fifteen years after my original trip to Moscow, I returned to Russia with a camera to spend eight months living in Moscow.

My original plan in Russia was to explore the changes that had occurred in post-Soviet Moscow through a documentation of my meetings with the fifteen Russian participants of my high school program. I had imagined that the filming of their lives in a contemporary setting would create a counterpoint to the historical investigation of the past, and I hoped to have conversations with my Russian peers about how they remembered their childhood / adolescent experiences of first encounter with the US – specifically issues of personal and national nostalgia as focused through the lens of the late Cold War period. Understanding my generation in Russia to be uniquely poised between being old enough to remember the Soviet system well and young enough to be comfortably integrated into the fast-paced hypercapitalism of the New Russia, I expected the discussion around these questions to generate a complex and nuanced space of reflection.

Ironically, I quickly learned that my generation of young Russians found itself in 2003 in a moment of being singularly and systematically unreflective about the past. It’s often said of post-war Germany that it took a full generational cycle before young people felt free enough from the weight of their national history to finally begin to investigate what had happened during the war, to write and make films about Germany’s past. So in retrospect it makes sense that, after the huge shock of the immediate post-Soviet 90’s (years characterized by searing political talk shows assessing the damages of the past, volumes of writing on history, a mushrooming of political parties, and profound socioeconomic instability), Putin’s Russia is guarded, protective of its tenuous stability, politically disengaged, and aggressively anti-nostalgic. It should hardly have surprised me that no one – especially no one my age – had very much to say about the 80’s.

Ultimately, I only succeeded in meeting two of the fifteen Russians I had hoped to find. However, as part of my documentation process, I had filmed a complete record of all my phone calls as I attempted to track down my fifteen subjects (starting only with home phone numbers from 1989), called wrong numbers, talked to parents, tried and failed to arrange meetings with people who, for the most part, did not remember me and did not seem at all interested in the project. Back in the US, as I screened my footage from Moscow for other people, people consistently responded strongly to the images of the frustrated phone calls, and gradually I began to work with this material as a way to start to address directly the idea of failure in the piece. As I struggled to come to terms with my personal experience returning to Moscow, the phone call material took on increasing resonance, speaking to the idea of failure on multiple levels: failure of my “project,” failure to communicate (psychologically, culturally, linguistically, and acoustically), otherness / foreignness as a kind of failure, and of course the broader theme of the failure / erasure of historical and personal memory.

A Russian speaker would immediately discern that I make grammatical mistakes when I speak Russian, and a savvy interpreter of body language might also catch me hesitating when I actually have no idea what has just been said to me. I like the idea that the telephone makes explicit the idea of forced identification, and, as a documentary filmmaker, I especially like the idea of holding myself up as a specimen, a subject of the same uncomfortable scrutiny as my documentary interview subjects, or the young girls in the re-enactment / audition material.

Language and cultural assimilation have played a recurring central role in my work process, which is part of why I found the thread of the failed phone calls a potentially rich territory to work around. This project has been the third film I’ve made which has had a language learning / cultural immersion component built in to the work process. My first long-form piece, For Beijing with Love and Squalor (1997), was filmed after I had spent four years studying Mandarin and over a year living in China. Reconstruction (2001) involved a period of about eight months spent living in Bucharest, and in that case the Romanian language-learning process was concurrent with the filmmaking. So the decision to live in Moscow for an extended period of time (as well as to re-learn my nearly forgotten high school level Russian) was a natural one: the daily struggle to live in another country and learn to communicate (literally) with the people around me helps me think through many of the ideas about otherness, identification, and culture with which my artistic practice engages.