The Long Way Home
$45,000.00
Goal-
$10,000.00
Raised -
161
Days to go
, United States (US)
Short Sypnosis & Project Summary
The Long Way Home, directed by Michael Apted, tells the story of underground Soviet rock legend Boris Grebenshchikov’s odyssey to the West to make an album in 1988 and bring it back home in the early days of Glasnost (Soviet leader Gorbachev’s policy of openness).
Signed to CBS Records, Boris, who was fluent in English but had never been outside the USSR, was soon sharing a stage in Montreal with Crosby, Stills & Nash, then shuttling from Leningrad to New York, London and L.A. for recording sessions with producer Dave Stewart (of Eurythmics), and guest artists Annie Lennox, Chrissie Hynde, and Ray Cooper.
But Boris’s rock & roll dream turned bittersweet when the members of his long-time band, Aquarium, felt abandoned and his Russian fans, who had been inspired by him for years, were unsure about the English-language songs he performed in Leningrad with Stewart at his side – the climax of the film. Still, at the end of this journey Boris was optimistic, believing that collaborations like his with Stewart were harbingers of a new era for Russia.
Sadly, this hope was short-lived. Putin’s rise to power ended the dreams of democracy, and hundreds of thousands of freedom-loving Russians are now living in exile. Boris is one of them. As a critic of Putin’s war on Ukraine, he had to flee his homeland or face arrest and prison. He’s been in London for over two years, continuing to perform on world stages and speak out.
So, the time feels right to re-release Michael Apted’s eloquent documentary as a reminder of what might have been (and could yet be) and of the enduring power of music to raise spirits and resist tyranny and censorship.
The Long Way Home was originally released in 1989 to critical acclaim. After broadcast in the UK (Granada), US (Discovery) and in several international markets, it was briefly available in the US as a VHS home video, but by the early 21st century it had vanished, like many documentaries of its time. Michael Apted hoped to one day make a sequel, but this goal remained unfulfilled when he died in 2021.
Producer Steven Lawrence has finished raising funds to get The Long Way Home remastered in 4K from the only existing 16mm print that he kept, with 5.1 sound based on the stereo soundtrack from a master videotape. Once the new master is finished, Steven will seek distribution with a good percentage of revenues to be used to support refugees from Russia’s war against Ukraine. Appropriate charities are now being vetted.
At the end of the original film, title cards updated viewers about the release of Boris’s album, Radio Silence, and the lives of Boris and key band members. Steven is raising money for a new epilogue, to be co-directed with the film’s editor, Susanne Rostock, that will show what has become of Boris and bandmates 36 years later. It will run approximately 10-minutes and will serve as a poetic coda to the hopes and dreams of 1988. It will also partially fulfill Michael Apted’s wish to make a sequel. Details about the new epilogue are at the end of the detailed synopsis below.
Detailed Film Synopsis
It is spring of 1988. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has recently launched his policy of Glasnost, or openness. Signed to CBS Records by American co-managers KENNY SCHAFFER and MARINA ALBEE, BORIS, who is fluent in English but has never worked outside the USSR, is soon laying down tracks for his first English-language songs in NYC with producer DAVE STEWART. The next week he’s joined in Montreal by his band of 15 years, Aquarium. They share a stage with Crosby, Stills & Nash at a benefit concert. For Boris’s bandmates it is their first trip to the West. The relative opulence amazes them.
The next day the group records a song for the album at a luxurious lakeside studio outside Montreal, but the session is disrupted by arguments between Boris and the bandmembers about the arrangement, with cellist SEVA GAKKEL dismissing it as, “Russian corn.”
Back in Leningrad, we see the city’s haunting beauty through Boris’s eyes, with its grand canals and old Italianate buildings. At this moment Leningrad is alive with summer crowds enjoying street music “It’s something new,” says Boris – a sign of Glasnost’s impact. Fans come up to him for autographs. The stairwell of his apartment building is filled with graffiti praising him and his songs. At home with his wife LYUDA and their young son, GLEB, Boris can finally relax.
The members of Aquarium have been changed by their trip to Montreal. Bass player and musical director SASAH TITOV now realizes how poor and unfree life in Russia is, and how the smell of garbage is everywhere. Hopefully it will be different for his beloved baby daughter. Seva and drummer PIOTR TROSHENKOV fear they are not equal to Western musicians and Boris will abandon them, but Boris maintains they are too close for this to happen – “You cannot leave a family.”
At the Leningrad Rock Club, Boris and band perform This Train’s on Fire, Boris’s rousing anti-war anthem about a colonel who tells his troops it’s time to end 70 years of fighting and reclaim their land. The young audience is on its feet, but when Boris visits his mom, LUDMILLA, she tells him he must rock out more consistently so he can lift up his audience like Elvis did. Boris hears her out but says he can only do what’s right for him.
After June sessions in London with Dave, where singers ANNIE LENNOX and CHRISSIE HYNDE record backup vocals, and RAY COOPER adds percussion, Boris and Aquarium retreat to a dacha on the Gulf of Finland where they play together and try to rebuild their closeness, but the band members remain uneasy about Boris’s new songs and the future.
A few weeks later, Boris brings only Sasha to LA for final recording sessions at Dave’s home studio. By this point Boris is struggling to maintain his artistic gravity, unsure about the polished rock style Dave has brought to his songs. Dave captures his confusion in an impromptu song, “The Ballad of Boris,” that he performs on guitar for Boris and Sasha. It ends with the lines, “It’s all about the land of the USSR, it’s the land that he’s forgot.”
Boris and Dave have decided to premiere the album, Radio Silence, for Boris’s hometown fans in Leningrad. It’s November and as Dave and band members from Eurythmics travel by bus across the Finnish border, snow is falling heavily. This journey and the band’s arrival are intercut with Boris and Aquarium performing one of his most beautiful and poetic Russian songs, The Boy.
Under Dave’s direction, Aquarium and Dave’s band rehearse the Radio Silence songs, trying to overcome language barriers and achieve musical cohesion. Two sold-out shows are scheduled at Leningrad’s largest sports arena. On the first night, Boris asks his fans to be openminded about his English songs and introduces Dave. He and Boris perform a riveting acoustic version of Boris’s Russian song, Stones in Cold Water. The rest of the show goes well, with the combined band finding its groove for the English songs, but post-concert fan statements reveal that audience reactions are mixed.
Boris and Dave aren’t satisfied and next morning rework some arrangements. That night, the improvement shows in an ecstatic performance of Radio Silence. As the band begins The Postcard, a song about Boris’s homesickness for Russia and the woman he loves, we cut away to him reflecting on his odyssey. He believes that the future will be, “Neither East nor West,” but like where he is now, collaborating with Dave and creating a bridge. The film ends with Boris onstage in close-up, pouring his soul into The Postcard, shouting out its final refrain, “You are on my mind,” until he is on the verge of collapse.
Epilogue. The original epilogue used brief title cards with details about the album’s release in 1989 and updates on Sasha, Piotr, and Seva. It ended with the optimistic statement that Boris was writing songs for a new Aquarium album to be recorded all over the world.
In a short new epilogue, to be filmed early 2025, viewers will learn that Boris abandoned the idea of crossing over in the West and resumed writing Russian songs, resulting in some of the best work of his career. Some members of Aquarium continued to work with him on and off, but they never reformed. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Boris spoke out against the war and had to flee to the UK to escape arrest and imprisonment. Sasha had previously moved to London. He and Boris have continued to record and perform together, musical brothers for life. Piotr left Russia for Finland, where he works as a drummer. Seva continued to make music but also opened a popular music club in St. Petersburg, wrote a book, and became a podcaster. Currently, he is doing what he can as a musician to support peace.
Michael Apted, Director
Michael Apted made documentaries and feature films for over forty years. Among his globally recognized, award-winning documentaries are the UP SERIES (1964-2019), which followed the lives of 14 British people from the age of seven, revisiting them every 7 years; THE LONG WAY HOME; MOVING THE MOUNTAIN; INCIDENT AT OGLALA and THE POWER OF THE GAME. His movies include COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER (which received 7 Academy Award nominations and won Best Actress for Sissy Spacek); GORKY PARK; GORILLAS IN THE MIST; THUNDERHEART; NELL; the James Bond film THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH; ENIGMA; AMAZING GRACE, THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER; CHASING MAVERICKS and UNLOCKED. He also cast the HBO series ROME and directed the first three episodes, and directed several episodes of RAY DONOVAN and MASTERS OF SEX for Showtime. In 2019, 63 UP was released theatrically. Michael was President of the Directors Guild of America for an unprecedented three terms, from 2003 through 2009.
Steven Lawrence, Producer/Epilogue Co-Director
Steven is a producer-director and media pioneer who has been making documentaries for over 30 years about artists, activists and everyday heroes – from underground Soviet rockers, to a Senegalese rapper fighting female genital cutting, to cat rescuers in Brooklyn, and scientists racing to save the human microbiome. As a producer his work includes three feature docs in collaboration with Michael Apted, including THE LONG WAY HOME and MARRIED IN AMERICA. He created the International Emmy-award winning series BORN IN THE USSR producing the first film, AGE 7 IN THE USSR. Among his other producing credits are THE FURIOUS FORCE OF RHYMES, SARABAH (Movies That Matter Golden Butterfly award), and Heddy Honigmann’s 100 UP. His directing credits include TELL TCHAIKOVSKY THE NEWS; ROCK IN RUSSIA for MTV, the interactive documentary series VIS à VIS series for PBS, THE CAT RESCUERS, winner of the 2018 Hamptons International Film Festival animal rights award, and THE INVISIBLE EXINCTION (with Sarah Schenck). He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife, Helen Garrett.
Susanne Rostock, Editor/Epilogue Co-Director
Esteemed as “an aural and visual poet”, Susanne’s most recent film as director/editor, FOLLOWING HARRY, joins the artist and activist Harry Belafonte, at the age of 84, as he embarks on an eleven-year journey to find out how to redirect oppression to oblivion. The film premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival. It’s a sequel to SING YOUR SONG, Susanne’s film about Harry Belafonte’s earlier life as an artist and activist. It was chosen to open the U.S. Documentary Competition section of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and was Shortlisted for an Oscar. It also garnered the NAACP Image Award. Susanne’s 20-year collaboration as editor with director Michael Apted produced such richly provocative films as: THE LONG WAY HOME; INCIDENT AT OGLALA; ME & ISAAC NEWTON; INSPIRATIONS; THE POWER OF THE GAME; MOVING THE MOUNTAIN. As producer and editor, she is presently completing UNTITLED, a feature-length documentary about homegrown American terrorism, directed by Jim Chambers. Susanne is also producing, directing, and editing BETWEEN STARSHINE AND CLAY: THE HIDDEN DIARY OF DIAHANN CARROLL, co-directed by Suzanne Kay and executive produced by Serena and Venus Williams. She resides in New York City.
Peter Gilbert, Cinematographer
Peter is an American documentary filmmaker, film producer, and cinematographer. He was the cinematographer and one of the producers of HOOP DREAMS a 1994 documentary about two teenage basketball players in Chucago. He has worked on several films for Kartemquin Films, including VIETNAM, LONG TIME COMING, AT THE DEATH HOUSE DOOR, (which he co-directed with Steve James), and IN THE GAME. He was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking in 2005 for producing WITH ALL DELIBERATE SPEED, a documentary about Brons Vs. Board of Education. Prior to HOOP DREAMS, he worked on the cinematography of AMERICAN DREAM by Barbara Kopple and with Haskell Wexler. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He lives in Chicago, where he grew up.
ALL DONATIONS ARE TAX-DEDUCTIBLE
A greater portion of your donation goes to the filmmakers if you mail a check to UnionDocs with “The Long Way Home” in the memo line. The address is UNIONDOCS 352 Onderdonk Ave. Ridgewood NY, 11385
| Name | Donate Amount | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Gerry Ohrstrom | $10,000.00 | December 16, 2024 |