Soviet Barbara – the Story of Ragnar Kjartansson in Moscow

Between art and popular culture, the famous American soap opera Santa Barbara becomes a compelling avant-garde artistic critique of what is configured as a post-Soviet empire, on the eve of Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine

In 1992, in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, the American soap opera Santa Barbara aired on Russian television, becoming a window on the Western way of life: it immediately established itself as a great success that marked the end of an era and the beginning of an unpredictable sociopolitical season. Thirty years later, a contemporary Icelandic artist, Ragnar Kjartansson, decided to re-stage the soap as an eminently artistic performance as part of a solo exhibition exhibited in a new art center in Moscow, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin. The artist plans to re-enact one hundred episodes of Santa Barbara in Russian, but when Ukraine is attacked by the Russian army, Kjartansson is faced with a moral dilemma: every artistic choice seems to translate into a political stance. In this engaging documentary, which has the same twists and turns as a soap opera, the criticism of current events is biting and the entire Russian society is subjected to a real X-ray.