PRODUCTION UPDATE



  Rebecca Feig's bye-bye Babushka blends improv with archival footage for a rare uncensored look inside the former Soviet Union. Feig's "babushkas" - Russian for "grandmothers" - were born under Lenin, grew up under Stalin, and now must struggle to assimilate within a new kind of Soviet life. Babushka cycles through individual portraits, topical commentary, street interviews, and performance art-like improvs describing milestones like joining the Young Communists League. "It's about what happens when there's a hierarchy for how things work and then you just erase it," says Feig. "The Soviet woman as traditionally defined became an extinct species nearly overnight, and you could call this film a subjective archive of lives gone by."

Feig's babushkas come from distant villages as well as Moscow, and she says her film is the first that's been shot by a foreigner in tiny central Russian Tamala, whose mayor provided carte blanche access when the filmmakers arrived accompanied by a returning exiled dissident they'd met en route.

Feig made her first shorts in the film program at SUNY Purchase and traveled the festival circuit with her 1990 senior project, The Waiting. By chance the 1991 coup found her in Siberia shooting documentary footage of Lake Baikal for an environmental group. "I spent four days crossing Russia by train with a cameraman," she says. "Every time we stopped, there were little women who seemed to be about 150 years old trying to sell us bread and telling everyone what to do. I was fascinated."

By 1993, Feig had moved to Paris to start formulating plans for a film that would become Babushka. She got hired to organize DISCOP, a Warsaw film-and-t.v. market geared towards creating opportunities for new broadcasters in Eastern Europe. She and partner Mitchell Rosenbaum ultimately mobilized some 40 newly privatized Russian broadcasters and brokered a three-way contract between them, French t.v. channel TF1, and sponsor Coca-Cola to bring Western programming like Moonlighting to the east. Proceeds from the company they formed, Prolink, financed Babushka in the low six-figure range. At press time they were back in New York, moving towards picture lock on the AVID system and wrestling with Babushka's subtitling. All rights remain available.

Crew: Producers, Mitchell Rosenbaum, Rebecca Feig; Associate Producers, Ekaterina Skorik, Jessica Cohen; Director, Feig; Cinematographer, Rosenbaum; Editor, Daisy Wright; Translator, Skorik; Still Photographer, Tony Pemberton; Contact: Mitchell Rosen-baum or Rebecca Feig, Persistence of Vision, 233 Broadway, Suite 3508, New York, NY 10279. Tel: (212) 799-8438, Fax: (212) 501-0553.



 
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