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In 1991, college freshman Robin Hessman traveled to what was then called Leningrad, to spend a semester abroad in a country that had fascinated her since childhood. She ended up living in Russia for the bulk of the 90s, eventually produced the country's version of Sesame Street. Her Sundance competition documentary My Perestroika chronicles not her own experience as an expat during the barely-post Cold War era, but the experience of five thirtysomething Russians who attended Soviet school together, and are now living very different lives in a post-Communist world for which they had no preparation.

The great hallmark of Hessman's film is its intimacy; her subjects, ranging from husband and wife school teachers to a punk-turned-subway busker to an international businessman, casually tell their own stories over vodka and home movies, with no top-down narration or intervention. I interviewed Hessman here at Sundance, and following the form of the film, below the jump she tells her own story of coming to make a film about the "Russian Pepsi generation."

In today's print edition of the Village Voice (and tomorrow's edition of the LA Weekly), you'll find a story I wrote on Daddy Long Legs, the second feature by filmmaking brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, which premieres at Sundance this week and is now available for rental on cable VOD. The film, starring Ronald Bronstein (the director of Frownland) and Frey and Sage Ranaldo (sons of Sonic Youth guitarist Lee), is based on the Safdie brothers' own childhood memories of their father, who at one point kidnapped the boys and moved them from Manhattan to Queens. In a crazy alternative marketing move for the indie film, a Daddy producer landed the brothers a spot on CNN's Campbell Brown show talking about familial kidnapping. Watch that above, and find out how you can watch the film on your cable system here.

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Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg have made a name for themselves making documentaries (The Trials of Daryl Hunt, The Devil Came on Horseback, The End of America) that could be considered works of activism, in which charismatic victims of and witnesses to injustice offer evidence intended to raise not just the viewer's consciousness, but their ire. The pair thus did not seem like the obvious choice to tell the story of Joan Molinsky Rosenberg, the nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn better known as foul-mouthed comedienne/plastic surgery addict Joan Rivers.

Amazingly, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work might be best understood as one of a piece with Stern and Sundberg's activist work. If the entertainment industry ain't exactly Darfur, it still hasn't been an easy road for Rivers, whose boundary-breaking comic creativity will likely be listed low in her obituary, to make room for discussion of her obsession with reinvention. Stern and Sundberg sympathize with the star's plight, and provide an excellent platform for her gut-busting politically incorrect comedy to speak for itself.

Is Precious star Mo'Nique the "least superficial actress ever?" Such is the query posed by this NY Daily News item, which commends the Soul Plane actress for having "more important things on her mind than personal grooming," such as "dedicat[ing] her win to abuse victims everywhere."

This newsflash, complete with extreme close-up on the actresses' unshaven legs on the Golden Globes red carpet, plays into the "Mo'Nique refuses to play by Hollywood's rules," meme that's been going around ever since Precious (then called Push) debuted a year ago at Sundance. But isn't not playing the game its own kind of game playing? Aren't Mo'Nique's unshaven legs (or her namedropping of "real person" brands such as El Pollo Loco, as in the video above) just a version of former Best Supporting Actress winner Angelina Jolie's tattoos, so "shocking" for a starlet back in the late 90s and now shorthand for an "Angelina Jolie type"? Or is this sort of thing just a way to talk up Mo'Nique's general "outsider" cred (as a black woman with a predominantly non-white fanbase, as a comedienne playing it straight), without actually talking about it?

Regardless of Mo'Nique's strategy or lack thereof, it seems unfathomable at this point that anything could get in the way of her and Oscar. That said, the people seem less impressed than the press. The Daily News ultimately turns the issue over to their readers via a poll, which right now is trending overwhelmingly towards the negative verdict, "It's gross, period."