Michael Apted’s THE LONG WAY HOME: REMASTERED AND EXPANDED

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

Michael Apted’s The Long Way Home, a revealing, rollicking portrait of the Soviet underground rock legend Boris Grebenshchikov, who became the first to record in the West during the early, optimistic days of Glasnost-not quite believing he would collaborate with Dave Stewart, Annie Lennox, Chrissie Hynde, and Ray Cooper, Crosby, Stills & Nash and many more. The film was released to critical acclaim after its broadcast in the UK and premiere at Sundance, but has largely disappeared these past 30 years.

THE LONG WAY HOME: REMASTERED AND EXPANDED (2026) is based on the only existing 16mm print supervised by the films producer Steven Lawrence and editor Susanne Rostock. Lawrence, together with Rostock have also created an epilogue charting Grebenshchikov’s fate following the release of his US album Radio Silence as an exile and an outspoken critic of Putin’s war in Ukraine. The new epilogue partially fulfills Apted’s own ambitions to make a sequel before his death in 2021. (Courtesy of MoMA)

By 1988 Apted was already a hot director both in fiction (Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist) and nonfiction, the legendary Up series and Bring on the Night, his concert film about the making of Sting’s first solo album. Apted’s astonishing ability to get people to open up led to this complex study of an artist who seized a moment of unimaginable freedom to make new music with new musicians, yet who found members of his longtime band, Aquarium, feeling abandoned and his longtime Russian fans uncertain about his English-language songs when he returned home to perform them.

The film will screen as part of the TO SAVE AND PROJECT: The 22nd MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation on Wednesday, January 28 at 7PM at MoMA (11 W 53rd St, NY, NY 10019) Floor T2/T1 at The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2. There will be an in-person introduction by Producer Steven Lawrence and Editor Susanne Rostock. Tickets will be available January 21st at the MoMA event website HERE.

Michael Apted (Director)

Michael Apted made documentaries and feature films for over forty years. Among his globally recognized, award-winning documentaries are the Up Series (1964-2019), which followed the lives of 14 British people from the age of seven, revisiting them every 7 years; The Long Way Home; Moving The Mountain; Incident At Oglala and The Power Of The Game. His movies include Coal Miner’s Daughter (which received 7 Academy Award nominations and won Best Actress for Sissy Spacek); Gorky Park; Gorillas In The Mist; Thunderheart; Nell; The James Bond Film The World Is Not Enough; Enigma; Amazing Grace, The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader; Chasing Mavericks and Unlocked.

He also cast the HBO series ROME and directed the first three episodes, and directed several episodes of Ray Donovan and Masters Of Sex for Showtime. In 2019, 63 UP was released theatrically. Michael was President of the Directors Guild of America for an unprecedented three terms, from 2003 through 2009.

Steven Lawrence (Producer/ New Epilogue Co-Director)

Steven Lawrence is a producer-director who has been making documentaries for over 30 years about artists, activists and everyday heroes – from underground Soviet rockers, to a Senegalese rapper fighting female genital cutting, to cat rescuers in Brooklyn, and scientists racing to save the human microbiome. As a producer his work includes three feature docs in collaboration with Michael Apted, including The Long Way Home: Remastered And Expanded (2026)  and Married In America. He created the International Emmy-award winning series Born In The Ussr producing the first film, Age 7 In The Ussr. Among his other producing credits are The Furious Force Of Rhymes; Sarabah (Movies That Matter Golden Butterfly award), and Heddy Honigmann’s 100 UP.

His directing credits include Tell Tchaikovsky The News; Rock In Russia for MTV; the interactive documentary series Vis a Vis series for PBS; The Cat Rescuers, winner of the 2018 Hamptons International Film Festival animal rights award, and The Invisible Exinction (with Sarah Schenck).

Susanne Rostock (Editor/New Epilogue Co-Director/Editor)

Susanne’s over 20-year collaboration as editor with director Michael Apted produced such richly provocative films as: The Long Way Home; Incident At Oglala; Me & Isaac Newton; Inspirations; The Power Of The Game; Moving The Mountain.

Esteemed as “an aural and visual poet”, Susanne’s most recent film as director/editor, Following Harry, joins the artist and activist Harry Belafonte, at the age of 84, as he embarks on an eleven-year journey to find out how to redirect oppression to oblivion. The film premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival. It’s a sequel to Sing Your Song, Susanne’s film about Harry Belafonte’s earlier life as an artist and activist. It was chosen to open the U.S. Documentary Competition section of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and was Shortlisted for an Oscar. It also garnered the NAACP Image Award.

Susanne is presently producing, directing, and editing The Hidden Diary Of Diahann Carroll, a documentary film based on the secret diary found by her daughter shortly after her death. Diahann Carroll knew that every step she took to push back against established norms mattered and this documentary is a way to make sure history remembers her, not just for her glossy image, but for her complexity. The film is co-directed by Suzanne Kay and executive produced by Serena and Venus Williams.

A founding father of Russian rock

Boris Grebenshchikov (BG) is considered to be one of the “founding fathers” of Russian rock music and currently resides in London, UK.

MoMA’s 22nd annual edition of To Save and Project is an international festival dedicated to celebrating newly preserved film treasures from archives, studios, and independent filmmakers. Many of the premieres in the MoMA festival will be receiving their first US screening since their original release; others will be shown in meticulously restored versions that more closely approximate the original experience of the film; a few will even be publicly screened for the first time ever in New York. In 2024, To Save and Project was honored with special awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics in celebration of its 20th anniversary. WEBSITE

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*Special thanks to Emma Griffiths for information and promotional assets. (EG PR) WEBSITE