Lynda Myles
Inspired by the 1980s American soap opera, Santa Barbara, Svetlana became a mail-order bride from post-Soviet Russia to America. She took her two children with her to California to meet a stranger, a man who would soon become her husband and father to her children. The film brings together the audition process, behind- the-scenes footage, archival home movies, scripted scenes, and an interview with the director's mother, Svetlana. This project is an immersive form of visual storytelling that employs memory and performance in equal measure to show the journey of immigrating to America.
Santa Barbara is an American television soap opera, first broadcast in the United States on NBC on July 30, 1984, and last aired on January 15, 1993. The show revolves around the eventful lives of the wealthy Capwell family of Santa Barbara, California. Other prominent families featured on the soap were the rival Lockridge family, and the more modest Andrade and Perkins families. The serial was co-produced by NBC and Dobson Productions until February 1985, when New World Pictures joined NBC and Dobson as a production partner. The newly created partnership, New World Television, then served as the distributor for the show. Santa Barbara aired in over 40 countries around the world. The show's popularity continued to rise, and it even had fans in the White House. In 1985, when character Augusta Lockridge was blinded following a tunnel collapse, Ronald Reagan sent actress Louise Sorel a letter saying he and Nancy were praying for her and hoped she recovered. Santa Barbara has won 24 Daytime Emmy Awards and was nominated 30 times for the same award. The show also won 18 Soap Opera Digest Awards, and won various other awards. In 1993, NBC replaced Santa Barbara with game shows Scrabble and Scattergories. Shortly before the program was canceled by NBC, New World Television tried to shop Santa Barbara to other broadcast and cable networks, but failed to find one that would air the show.
In this enigmatic thriller, Susannah (Tusse Silberg) is suddenly herded out of an apartment in the middle of the night and brought to a police station for extensive questioning about why she was in a place that belonged to a known criminal. What the police do not know is that Susannah has been somehow involved in the death of a woman and has reunited with her sister Julie (Lisa Kreuzer) in Berlin. Julie herself has some rather unusual friends -- including Eddie Constantine the American-born French actor and singer who plays himself. It is these characters and their dialogue and asides, and even background action and scenery, that form the real body of this specialized film -- not the plot. For these reasons, this type of film is best limited to those who are more interested in avant-garde than in commercial cinema.
