The Long Way Home. 1989/2026. UK. Directed by Michael Apted. With Boris Grebenshchikov. Remaster world premiere. DCP. In English, Russian; English subtitles. 98 min.
Michael Apted’s The Long Way Home, a revealing, rollicking portrait of the Soviet underground rock legend Boris Grebenshchikov, who became the first to record in the West during the early, optimistic days of Glasnost—not quite believing he would collaborate with Dave Stewart, Annie Lennox, Chrissie Hynde, and Ray Cooper—was released to critical acclaim after its broadcast in the UK and premiere at Sundance, but has largely disappeared these past 30 years. By 1988 Apted was already a hot director both in fiction (Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist) and nonfiction (the legendary Up series and Bring on the Night, his concert film about the making of Sting’s first solo album). Apted’s astonishing ability to get people to open up led to this complex study of an artist who seized a moment of unimaginable freedom to make new music with new musicians, yet who found members of his longtime band, Aquarium, feeling abandoned and his longtime Russian fans uncertain about his English-language songs when he returned home to perform them. Thanks to Steven Lawrence, the film’s producer, The Long Way Home will now have a second life in this newly remastered edition. In addition, together with Susanne Rostock, the film’s editor, he has created an epilogue charting Grebenshchikov’s fate following the release of his US album Radio Silence as an exile and an outspoken critic of Putin’s war in Ukraine. The new epilogue partially fulfills Apted’s own ambitions to make a sequel before his death in 2021.
Remastered version, based on the only existing 16mm print, supervised by producer Steven Lawrence and editor Susanne Rostock.