My husband, Jim, and I were in Estonia, teaching a filmmaking course at the first university to teach film after the departure of the Soviets. After awhile, friends an coworkers started to share stories with us. As we sat and listened, these powerful stories and images began to unfold...
My husband, Jim, and I were in Estonia, teaching a filmmaking course at the first university to teach film after the departure of the Soviets. After a while, friends and coworkers started to share stories with us. As we sat and listened, these powerful stories and images began to unfold. We would sit over dinner and look at each other and say, Why is it we've never heard about this?! When we returned home, it was amazing to tell the story outside of Estonia. That's when we finally decided that we really wanted to share this story outside of Estonia to share it with all of the people who know nothing or very little of this amazing country.
We were afraid that Estonians might justifiably feel that two people who live 5,000 miles away didn't have the right to tell this story. We weren't there, after all. But for those living in Estonia, the Singing Revolution and independence are current events, not quite yet history. We have been told by many Estonians that this is a topic that needed someone from the outside to tell itsomeone with no prior bias, but who also didn't have to start from scratch understanding the situation.
During the Singing Revolution, there were essentially three different political movements striving to break free of the Soviets, all of them hinging on the same basic question: Do you cooperate with your occupiers or not? If so, how much? In order to tell the whole Singing Revolution story, we had to be able to share each of their viewpoints.
We were two years in the editing process. Three times we flew to Estonia to share the film with representatives from each group. We showed them the film separately and privately so that they could freely comment. For the first two screenings, there were many suggestions. We did our research, accepted some comments, modified others, and a few we simply let pass. But in the end, all agreed this film told the correct story of how the revolution happened. All agreed the film was complete and balanced.
I don't want to inflate the importance of our film, but we've often thought that maybe history would have been different if the rest of the world understood the Estonian situation in 1939, when Stalin first came in. Maybe in a small way this film can help prevent something like this from happening again.