The Samantha Smith Project (2005) – excerpt

A meditation on historical amnesia, nostalgia, and the manufacturing and dismantling of political enemies. Braiding 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 fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, The Samantha Smith Project explores the aftermath of the Cold War and the contemporary Russian landscape.