Otherland is the story of a six-week trip traversing three generations, three lifetimes and three profoundly different but profoundly interconnected stories of mothers and daughters.

But, in Maria and Billie’s case, the past was not simply another country, but one that no longer existed. Along with exploring the political and cultural fallout of a century of turmoil, Maria wanted to bring together the worlds of her mother and daughter – the different continents, histories and experiences they encompassed.īefore they set off, Maria wistfully imagined her and Billie’s hearts beating in unison as they travelled back to a past they could both understand, forging a nearly superhuman bond along the way. Splintered and scattered across the world, her generation has ended up inhabiting vastly different realities. For Maria the trip back is no simple stroll down memory lane. Maria Tumarkin travels with her Australian-born teenage daughter, Billie, back to Russia and Ukraine to have her experience first-hand the seismic shifts of her family’s native country. I was not there when my generation was cornered by history.” I left too early, I missed the whole point. I left before Chechnya, before the mass renaming of cities and streets, before you could go into a shop and actually purchase the books of Brodsky, Pasternak and Nabokov. I left before Russia and Ukraine became separate countries, before the KGB archives were opened, before the Russian version of Wheel of Fortune, before the word “Gulag” appeared in textbooks. “I left too early, before tanks rolled into Moscow in 1991, and before Gorbachev was put under home arrest in a failed coup.

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