“It is a film from an extended series. It is hard to say who is the main character of “The Soviet Elegy.” There are more than a hundred faces of our compatriots. But, of course, it is not by chance that it is the destiny of a famous political figure, Boris Nikolayevitch Yeltsin, that bears a special accent in the film. Though he got to power following quite typical ways, his uncommon character puts him out of the ordinary, and in the author’s opinion it may be determined by his uncommon human nature. Our hero exists within the tragic pattern of the soviet socialist life. He is a character of a drama, of which he is one of the authors. “The Soviet Elegy” can hardly be called a documentary film in the proper sense. Of course, the author guarantees the accuracy of chronology, but he insists on an artistic mode of thinking, not on a political or historical investigation.”
In this powerful documentary, Mama Yang, an 84-year-old woman living in New York, finds herself in correspondence with 45 high security prison inmates she views as her own children. Most are Chinese American immigrants, and see in Mama Yang a mother figure they never knew before they stepped through prison walls.
For Mama Yang though, the story is about more than Christian charity. She had already lived a full life in Taiwan when her husband died at age sixty and her son lost their house in a financial blunder. She moved to the US to start anew and lives with a Taiwanese American granddaughter that remains distant. In a film marked by family separations, Mama Yang writes letters – whether to the incarcerated or to her own granddaughter – to heal lifetimes of wounds.