Potato Dreams of America (2021) on Netflix
NR20211h 37mComedyDramaFantasy
In Vladivostok, Potato escapes into an imaginary film while his mother, Lena, a prison doctor, dreams of America. A mail-order bride catalog brings a reply from John, a man in Seattle.
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- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb6.4/101,057 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes91%
Trailer
Plot summary
Lena leaves her abusive, alcoholic husband and settles in Vladivostok with her son, nicknamed Potato. She works as a doctor in a prison, where her corrupt supervisor wants her to write off dubious prisoner deaths as accidents. Potato retreats into an imaginary film of his own, and at school he rebels against the waning communist ideology while a living portrait of Vladimir Lenin watches the class. A renegade television channel shows pirated American movies, and mother and son fall for Hollywood's happy endings. Potato meets Jesus Christ at Sunday school and takes his new imaginary friend home. Lena finds an advertisement for a mail-order bride catalog; an older man in Seattle, John, replies and decides to bring them to the United States. Tamara, Lena's discouraging mother, keeps putting them down.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Potato Dreams of America (2021)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film treats language in mirror image: in the Soviet scenes the characters speak English with no Russian accent, while the realistic Seattle half has the two leads speaking thick Russian accents, a device Wes Hurley compared to American productions of Chekhov's plays.
- The film was made on a micro-budget, so Wes Hurley could not build large realistic sets of 1980s Russia; he used magic realism and heightened theatricality instead, saying it shapes the story the way a child would remember it.
- Wes Hurley's autobiographical film is closely based on true events from his own life, and he first wrote the script in 2013 after the controversy over holding the Olympic Games in Sochi.
- The feature grew out of Hurley's 15-minute short documentary Little Potato and a VR piece covering the same story; the short won the Oscar-qualifying Jury Prize at South by Southwest in 2016 and landed at The Atlantic and The Criterion Channel.
