PereSTROIKA: ReCONSTRUCTION of a flat

In this apartment, each room has a different owner. Although they live together in one apartment, no one has ever been in the other's room. Imagine having to live with your family in a single room and sharing a kitchen, bathroom and telephone with up to two dozen other people. This is not unusual in St. Petersburg, but a relic from the times of Soviet standardized allocation and far from a thing of the past. Untrained in dealing with property but trained for decades in obtaining state allocations, the exploration of an appropriate market value for the individual rooms in this apartment sets a dynamic in motion that puts the relationship between all those involved to the test one last time. Now it's no longer about who blocks the bathroom for how long in the morning or stinks up the kitchen with particularly strong food smells. Now that they are irrevocably parting ways, everyone wants to get the best for themselves and will stop at nothing to do so. Because either everyone moves out, or no one does! The film unravels this search for ever new solutions by patiently following each narrative thread. Instead of moralizing and distorting its protagonists - here the profit-hungry estate agents, there the powerless residents of the communal apartment - it stays close to them and shows them in the context of a movement that leads the former neighbors apart in all directions. Because pereSTROIKA focuses on the details of its protagonists' existential struggle for a new home, the film paints a picture of what a free market economy felt like in Russia in the mid-noughties, when this film was shot.