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A poetic portrait of a poignant political afterlife.
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Director Vitaly Mansky secures an intimate audience with the former Soviet premier whose democratic reforms helped end the Cold War.
A lyrical portrait of a former political giant in his twilight years, Vitaly Mansky s
Gorbachev. Heaven is an unusually intimate docu-memoir that feels like an epitaph. Thirty years after his
perestroika program of democratic reforms triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberated Eastern Europe from Communist tyranny and effectively ended the Cold War, former Russian premier Mikhail Gorbachev is living in diminished circumstances with a bitterly contested legacy. His home is a palatial villa outside Moscow, part fortress, part mausoleum, which he only occupies on a temporary loan basis. There are echoes of Winston Churchill in his imposing presence nowadays, but overtones of King Lear, too: a deposed emperor, his powers fading.