Cast overview:
Nikita Mikhalkov .... Himself
Anna Mikhalkova .... Herself
Nadezhda Mikhalkova .... Herself
Synopsys
ANNA is a unique mixture of home movie and epic history. Nikita Mikhalkov's remarkable documentary, at once intensely intimate and sweepingly ambitious, is a companion piece to the director's fictional features (A SLAVE OF LOVE, OBLOMOV, DARK EYES, CLOSE TO EDEN, BURNT BY THE SUN), expressing the same lyrically humanist vision and developing the same central theme of personal sensibility in the midst of vast historical change.
Juxtaposing macrocosm and microcosm, the film sets the collapse of the Soviet Union against the growth of Mikhalkov's daughter Anna over the course of thirteen years, beginning in 1980. Because of the prevailing censorship restrictions, Mikhalkov decided that the best way to express his thoughts on his ailing nation was to make a `home movie,' set at his country estate and shot in secret at considerable risk to himself and his collaborators.
Every year, starting at age six, Anna Mikhalkov is subjected to an interview centering on the same five questions: "What do you love the most? What do you hate the most? What scares you the most? What do you want more than anything? What do you expect from life?" Anna's personal evolution is interwoven with archival footage and propaganda films tracing the death throes of the Soviet Empire from the stagnant last years of the Brezhnev regime though the shake-up of Gorbachev's perestroika reforms to the shaky first steps toward democracy under Boris Yeltsin. This historical overview is accompanied by Mikhalkov's insightful, often caustic voice-over commentary and mixed with footage from his earlier fictional films -- most crucially OBLOMOV(1980), which provides a resonant comparison between its hero, a boy growing up in the late Czarist empire, and Anna, growing up in the twilight of the Soviet empire. Also included is previously suppressed footage from Mikhalkov's 1981 film FAMILY RELATIONS, a thinly veiled commentary on the waste of life in the ill- advised Afghanistan war.
Rather than trivializing its subject, ANNA's audacious method deftly embodies its central contention that the more the rotting Communist regime strained to support the false image of glory, the more its citizens led double lives, retreating into private realms of home and family -- "Our own tiny homeland," as Mikhalkov calls it. He searches for the essential meaning of the lost Soviet empire not in its pomp and slogans, nor in the rise and fall of its famous leaders, but in its effects upon the impressionable minds of his daughter and, by implication, the other individuals who grew up under the weight of a dying order and now represent an uncertain but hopeful future. At the heart of Mikhalkov's deeply felt film is a baffle for his child's soul, and we share his concern as we witness Anna's development from playful child to propagandized youngster to self conscious adolescent to thoughtful young woman about to leave the nest. The final shots show Mikhalkov's younger daughter Nadia, who co-starred in BURNT BY THE SUN and who will perhaps now serve as the heroine of a sequel to ANNA, embarking into the unknown destiny of "our great and unfortunate land."
