In the beginning of The Shattered Mirror, director Goldovskaya trains her camera on an anonymous Muscovite waiting in line at a gas station. “Who are you filming for?” Goldovskaya is asked. “For history,” she replies. In her opening lecture, Goldovskaya will discuss her vision for a committed documentary film, relating it to a tradition reaching back to Dziga Vertov, peripatetic director of The Man with a Movie Camera (1928).

(Oskolki zerkala). The Soviet Union had fallen. The 1991 putsch was a thing of the past. Russia, having lost a quarter of its total population and territory, was once again “Russia,” a country poised on the brink of reform and change. How was this reflected in the lives of ordinary people? The question is approached in a series of interviews with a banker, a worker, an automobile enthusiast at a gas station, a composer, an engineer, an artist, a historian, all of them friends, either old or new, of Marina Goldovskaya. Their fates-including the fate of the director-are those small slivers of a broken mirror reflecting a vast reality: the fate of Russia itself as it sits poised to take historic steps into the future.