Reason.tv‘s new video above, produced by MPI fellow Anthony Fisher, features stories from the Los-Angeles based Wende Museum, whose mission is to preserve Cold War artifacts and personal histories from the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain, with particular emphasis on East Germany.

The Wende Museum aims to make resources available to scholars and apply historical lessons of the past to the present. While only twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is vital to know these stories and reflect on how much we can learn from this time in our nation’s history.

At MPI, we believe the best way to tell a story is through the art of film. And one story that needs to be told is that of The Singing Revolution.

A moving, intensely human testament to the sustaining power of hope and the motivating strength of song, The Singing Revolution documents how, between 1987 and 1992, the Estonian people peacefully attained political independence after decades of Soviet occupation.

As Matt Zoller Seitz of the New York Times put it, “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 you’ve only begun to imagine the force of The Singing Revolution.”

Check out the trailer here.