- The IMDB plot synopsis is not terribly revealing and so I will just quote the Hot Docs website for a longer description of the movie, since I’m sure it will never get a wide release in North America.
Winner of the Best Documentary prize at the Warsaw International Film Festival, this witty, charming, and provocative film recounts how Estonian engineers fabricating makeshift TV antennas, and rural farm girls updating townspeople on the plot developments on “Dallas”, led to the demise of the Soviet Union. Even at the height of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain couldn’t stop the people of Estonia from rigging their Soviet-made televisions to pluck the forbidden cultural fruit broadcast by Finnish TV.
Awesome.
- Being born in 1982 and having spent the first six years of my life in a remote northern Ontario town, I don’t have a lot of personal memories about the cold war and as such I’m somewhat myopic in the fascination I have with the period. The amazing delusions and paranoia and intense totalitarianism often seem completely bizarre from my current vantage point and it was for that reason that I added this movie to my Hot Docs queue, since the idea of northern Estonians battling the Soviets through pirated Finnish television just killed me.
- This movie is spectacularly dry, casually irreverent, and frequently hilarious. It’s told using a variety of media from various sources — old photographs, clips of popular American television shows, interview footage of Soviet leaders, etc. — but it’s the reenactments that are particularly funny. Watching Jaak’s cousins in southern Estonia read aloud letters from Jaak detailing what’s happening on Dallas nearly had me in tears; it’s so inane and so ridiculous a concept and yet this may have been reality for people.
- In the Q&A someone asked about how this period of history is viewed from within Finland and Estonia and he talked about how much of it is true in concept but that it is peppered with some exaggerations and conspiracy theories, e.g. how the screening of the porn film Emmanuelle was responsible for ending the cold war. The director somewhat jokingly said he believes in his version of this history and the way the movie is made makes it quite clear that personal versions of major historical fact are just as revealing as the textbook versions (especially when your textbooks are Soviet-sanctioned and not necessarily accurate).
- I wish I remembered more but I saw this yesterday afternoon and am recovering from a decent sized hangover today, so I’m out of luck. Sorry!
Disco and Atomic War
You should find a way to see this if you love cold war history.
IMDB Plot Synopsis The film tells the story of a strange kind of information war, where a totalitarian regime stands face to face with the heroes of popular culture. And loses.