craziness

here is a small interview with the filmaker on reason.com

Q: How did songs become an essential part of the Estonian revolution?

A: Music has always been part of Estonian history. For thousands of years the Estonians have been singing folk songs. They have one of the largest collections of folk songs in the world, even though they’re a very small country. So it was very natural that music would become part of the weapon that they would use to fight the Soviets. They have this song festival every five years called Laulupidu, which is 30,000 singers coming on stage to sing in harmony. And it’s not any 30,000 people who want to sing; these people audition, so it’s the best 30,000 singers.

Well, in 1947 Stalin had already come in and occupied Estonia. He declared the song festival a “bourgeois tradition,” and he declared the first annual Soviet Song Festival, making the Estonians sing songs in Russian that glorified Lenin and Stalin and Marx. But the Estonians snuck one by. That song became the unofficial national anthem in Estonia, and for the next 50 years they always sang it to close the Song Festivals.

Q: So what happened in the late ’80s?

A: In June of 1988, there was a rock concert with, I don’t know how many, tens of thousands of youth who were there singing into the night. The Soviet authorities got worried, and they shut down the concert. So the people walked three miles to an open field to continue singing, and they sang until five or six in the morning. And it went on for a week. Every night more and more people came until there were maybe 100,000 to 150,000 people singing these rock ’n’ roll songs, as well as some traditional songs. The Soviet police saw this, but they didn’t know what to do. And the Estonians just kept on pushing that envelope, until eventually they contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Q: What broader lesson did you learn from this story?

A: What this film is about is humankind’s indomitable drive for independence. If there’s a reason to see the film, it’s to start understanding liberty and freedom at a base level. I reduce freedom to this reality: I don’t want my neighbor telling me what color to paint my living room. Let’s get it down to that, and then let’s move out from that slowly, and talk about what political systems give us all the individual freedom we need.

This is not a political film. This is a story. And you will cry in the beginning and feel uplifted in the end, I promise.