Disco and Atomic War

The documentary tells the Cold War from an unexpected place: the ways people in Estonia found to watch Finnish television. Living under Soviet rule, Estonians managed by ways of their own devising to catch the broadcast from across the border, and it became a window onto Western popular culture. Disco, television serials and advertisements before long stood up against the official account. The film tells this with archive footage and with reconstructions, and it never lets go of its humour. The account does not write this as an epic of heroism; the emphasis falls on the ban being broken above all by everyday curiosity. What the people chasing the signal cared about was not politics but what they would watch that evening. Jaak Kilmi’s seventy eight minute Estonian documentary was completed in 2009.