Michael Apted’s ‘The Long Way Home’ Remastered Version Makes Premiere at MoMA Fest

Get ready for a rock & roll resurrection. Michael Apted’s The Long Way Home is coming back into the spotlight, newly restored and expanded, and titled The Long Way Home: Remastered and Expanded, the film will world premiere at To Save and Project: The 22nd MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation.

Originally filmed in the late 1980s, the documentary is a lively, intimate portrait of Boris Grebenshchikov, the godfather of Soviet underground rock and frontman of the legendary band Aquarium. At a moment when Glasnost cracked open the door between East and West, Grebenshchikov walked through it guitar-first, becoming one of the first Russian rock musicians to record in the West. What followed was equal parts cultural collision, musical experimentation, and personal reckoning. Collaborating with Dave Stewart and crossing paths with Annie Lennox, Chrissie Hynde, Ray Cooper, and Crosby, Stills & Nash, Grebenshchikov found himself living a dream he barely believed was real.

Directed by Michael Apted, already renowned at the time for both his fiction films (Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist) and groundbreaking documentaries (the Up series, Bring on the Night), The Long Way Home captures not just the excitement of creative freedom, but its complications. As Grebenshchikov embraced new sounds and audiences, tensions surfaced back home. Members of Aquarium felt left behind, and longtime Russian fans were unsure what to make of his English-language songs when he returned to perform them. Apted’s gift for drawing out emotional honesty turns these conflicts into the film’s beating heart.

After premiering at Sundance and airing in the UK to strong critical response, the film quietly vanished for decades. Now, thanks to producer Steven Lawrence and editor Susanne Rostock, it has been meticulously remastered from the only surviving 16mm print. Even better, the new edition includes a newly created epilogue directed by Lawrence and Rostock, tracing Grebenshchikov’s life after his U.S. album Radio Silence, his years in exile, and his outspoken opposition to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. The epilogue fulfills Apted’s long-held wish to revisit the story, a plan cut short by his death in 2021.

With its mix of music history, political context, and raw human storytelling, Apted’s film is equal parts time capsule and time machine, and its return couldn’t be more timely.

To Save and Project: The 22nd MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation

SCREENING:
Wednesday, January 28 at 7:00PM
Location: MoMA, Floor T2/T1, Theater 2
(The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2)
With an in-person introduction by Producer Steven Lawrence and Editor Susanne Rostock.