A LEGEND IN OUR MIDST –

April 13, 2021 – When Oleg passed, he left me his autobiography to complete. As I interviewed top Soviet actors and directors, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Walter Hill, Roger Donaldson, as well as friends and colleagues across three continents, I decided his story was worth a film. … Oleg Vidov was born with an angel on his shoulder in a now-dead totalitarian country that did not tolerate the concept of individual freedom or rule of law. Travel outside the USSR was a privilege denied to all but a small number of the cultural elite but because his mother was a well-respected specialist in the field of literacy, he spent his early childhood in exotic Mongolia and in bombed-out Leipzig, a city in Soviet-controlled East Germany. There he learned piano, which he would play for the rest of his life, to speak German, and to be precise. During his three childhood years in the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, on the Chinese border, he discovered cinema watching the pre-war films produced by the USSR and the American trophy films like Tarzan and Grapes of Wrath that the Soviet troops pilfered from Joseph Goebel’s archives in Potsdam. He entered the workforce at the age of 14 when his mother became too ill to work…

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