Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara is a personal exploration of immigration through the eyes of one family, my own. In Russia, the 1980s soap opera Santa Barbara — saturated with wealth and sun—was the first and, for a long time, the only American show available. For many families, it symbolized all of America, all of the West. My own family was no exception.

Inspired by the show, my mother found a way to achieve the true American dream. “I am a young woman from Moscow,” my mother wrote in a classified advertisement. “I want to see America, and meet a kind man who can show me the country.” The ad attracted dozens of American men who wrote back, inviting her to a new life on the other side of the world. One of them was from Santa Barbara. And this is where the story begins: the experience of touching something that felt untouchable. My mother became a mail-order bride, taking my brother and I with her to America to meet the man who would soon take the place of my real father.

In light of the immigration ban in the United States, I wanted to examine my own family’s history and worked with the original writer of Santa Barbara to create a script reflecting the journey my mother made to America. After interviewing dozens of women, I came to learn that my mother was among a cohort of other Russian women who came to America as mail-order brides. For many, becoming a mail-order bride provided a means of escaping poverty following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. That desperation drove thousands of women, like my mother, to seek a different life. This project aims to offer insight into the world of these women and the ultimate sacrifices they made to become American.

For the past year, I've worked with a set of actors to re-construct my family’s first experiences as immigrants in America. Through film and still images, this project attempts to re-create the experiences of our journey, allowing viewers to put themselves in the shoes of an immigrant family. This is not only my family’s story, it is the story of a mother, her courage, and the courage of all immigrants in America.