By Jason Apuzzo. A film from the recent LA Film Festival that we loved was Disco & Atomic War. Disco is an extraordinary new Estonian documentary about the so-called ’soft power’ influence of American and Western culture on the minds of Soviet citizens living in Estonia during the Cold War, who were able through clever means to watch Finnish television broadcasts emanating from just over the border. As Disco informs us (in amusing detail), American popular culture – especially in the form of glamorous TV shows like “Dallas,” or movies like Star Wars and even Emmanuelle – was deeply feared by Soviet authorities due to the ideas and expectations such programming planted in the minds of Soviet citizens. This led to amusing co-optings, such as the Soviets creating their own officially sanctioned disco instruction course for TV(!).
You can read the LFM review of Disco and Atomic War from the LA Film Festival, and also read LFM Contributor Joe Bendel’s recent review on Joe’s personal site.
This is documentary filmmaking at its finest, and easily one of the best – and most drily amusing – films I’ve seen this past year. We want to thank the folks at SnagFilms for making the full-length film available for everyone to see, for free. Also: special thanks to SnagFilms for following Libertas on Twitter!
Posted on July 30th, 2010 at 1:58pm.
That was really excellent! I didn’t know how I was going to see this because I haven’t been able to make it to any of the festivals that have been showing it. Many thanks to the filmmakers/Snag Films for making this available. This is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. Very, very funny, and really well edited. This is an important story tat everyone should know about. It just goes to show what a good influence American culture can have when it has the right messages. Or, I guess in this case, it was not really any overt message in American films/TV that got the Estonians excited, but the depiction of the freedom and prosperity in the West that the Soviets couldn’t cover up no matter how hard they tried.
Lauren – glad you enjoyed the film. Jason and I were really excited when we saw this recently at the LA Film Festival, and we were hoping it would reach a wider audience. The filmmakers obviously put years of effort into this – look at all the amazing archival footage they found, and the creative and funny re-creations that they staged – so I’m really glad now that everyone can see it on the internet. It’s great that Snag Films picked this up and made it available.
This movie also shows that things in the indie film world are not as ideologically closed-off as people think. Things are changing and now films that criticize Communism, Socialism, Islamic terrorism etc. are finally being made and getting out there. The message is – if you do really good work like this, it will be accepted into major film festivals and it will be picked up for some form of distribution. I hope all our readers (and filmmakers!) take some hope from this.
I was wondering how Snag Films can afford to show these movies for free, and then I saw all the ads they put into the film. Good film, but the ads were pretty distracting. Any chance this will be out on DVD soon so I can watch it all the way through without the ads?
Jeff – I’m sure they will find a way to make this available on DVD. That said, Snag Films has to find some way to make money off this if they’re going to show it for free on the internet and pay for the bandwidth charges. They have to put in ads. It seems a small price to sit through a few for such a good film. And hey, you didn’t have to drive an hour to a theater and pay for tickets (and parking) to see this the way we did! Enjoy it and spread the word to your friends.