‘Oleg: The Oleg Vidov Story’
‘Oleg: The Oleg Vidov Story’, a U.S.-Russia co-production will premiere this year at the Moscow International Film Festival April 23 and 25, 2021, the spiritual home of this great actor, once called the Robert Redford of the USSR. The 95-minute documentary which memorializes his rise to fame, his ill-fated marriage into the inner circles of the Brezhnev family, and his desperate escape to the West by illegally crossing a border was directed by Nadia Tass and produced by Joan Borsten.
Joan, whom he met in Rome, and married in the U.S., states:
This film is about my late husband, but it is not a “vanity” project. His life was so unique and interesting it deserves to be documented.
I grew up in Hollywood (my father was a studio executive). For more than ten years I worked first as a political reporter for Israel’s respected English language daily Jerusalem Post and then became an entertainment reporter for the LA Times Calendar section traveling from Spain to India, Poland to West Africa.”
Joan goes on to tell how she met Oleg…
I met Oleg quite by chance in Rome, where I was then living, and joined him in Los Angeles two months after he legally defected. Oleg was too good-looking for most of the parts Hollywood was then writing for Soviet characters. After Red Heat and Wild Orchid, the USSR fell. He returned to Moscow and we became involved in big projects from helping a fledgling Ukrainian air cargo company win long-term UN contracts to deliver humanitarian aid, to restoring and marketing about 50 hours of animation to the West, to co-founding a successful addiction treatment facility in Malibu based on Russian methodology.
