Born in the USSR: 21 Up

Born in the USSR: 21 Up (2005) — watch online on iFILM — is the third chapter in Sergei Miroshnichenko's long-running documentary portrait of twenty people born in the Soviet Union around 1985. The camera first found them in 1990, at age seven.

Now they're twenty-one. The USSR collapsed between installments and took their common ground with it. The subjects have scattered: Russia, the US, Israel, Germany, France, Georgia, Lithuania, Kyrgyzstan. Same crew, same faces — entirely different lives. Made with support from Granada Media Group and Russia's state television channel, the project plans to follow the same individuals all the way to age seventy.

The strongest force here is not any single story but the accumulation of years. Stream Born in the USSR: 21 Up online on iFILM.