MPI was founded on the premise that someone besides Hollywood is going to have to do the work of bringing the ideal of freedom into the realm of film. It's having great success--and it's great to see people noticing. There's a nice piece in Reason all about how the entertainment industry continues to sidestep important historical material--and how the work of making movies about resistance to totalitarianism has fallen to independent filmmakers. Topping the list of such exemplary indie films is The Singing Revolution:
A spate of recent films—none of them produced in Hollywood—is ... providing a more nuanced picture of the Cold War, one that eschews simple moral equivalence in favor of the dystopian reality of the Eastern Bloc.This past year saw the release of The Singing Revolution, a riveting documentary detailing the little-known story of Estonia's non-violent resistance to Soviet occupation .... Almost a decade ago in reason, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley rightly bemoaned the film industry's lack of interest in arguably the 20th century's greatest tragedy: the stubborn adherence of politicians, artists, and intellectuals to the dogma of Marxism-Leninism. The recent crop of films promises, however belatedly, to begin the process of correction.
That's a highly abbreviated version--but you get the point. If it weren't for determined independent filmmakers and organizations such as MPI, these visions of history would be far less available to us, and would be in far more risk of being forgotten.
The performance embedded above is not part of the Singing Revolution--but would not have been possible without it. Freedom takes many forms, some of them tongue-in-cheek. And this is good.