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Songs for a Brighter Tomorrow
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: May 8th, 2008
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/movies/14revo.html?ex=1...
Can singing change history? The Singing Revolution, a documentary by James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty about Estonias struggle to end Soviet occupation, shows that it already has. The first part of Revolution provides a thumbnail sketch of 20th-century Estonian history, and its not pretty. This small nation was a satellite state of the former Soviet Union for much of that time, except for a brief period when the Germans controlled it. Under the Soviets, especially, Estonian culture was brutishly suppressed, but it welled up every five years in July, when Estonians gathered in Tallinn for the Estonian song festival, which often drew upward of 25,000 people. The images of these festivals are moving already; the force of the singers and the precision of their conductors are stunning to behold. But the emotion swells further when Estonians defy their occupiers by singing nationalist songs. This bold act reclaimed Estonian identity and set the stage for a series of increasingly daring rebellions under the Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who advocated glasnost and got more than he bargained for. Imagine the scene in Casablanca in which the French patrons sing La Marseillaise in defiance of the Germans, then multiply its power by a factor of thousands, and youve only begun to imagine the force of The Singing Revolution.
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