DISCO AND ATOMIC WAR
Directed by Jaak Kilmi
Produced by Kiur Aarma
Written by Kilmi & Aarma
Released by Icarus Films
English, Estonian, Finnish & Russian with English subtitles
Estonia/Finland. 80 min. Not Rated
 

George Orwell’s 1984 collides with Guy Maddin’s surreal docu-fantasia My Winnipeg in Jaak Kilmi’s gravely hilarious documentary. Born in Tallinn, Kilmi teams with fellow-Estonian Kiur Aarma to create their slightly subversive account of life in the mid-1980s Soviet Union, when Finnish airwaves infiltrate the Iron Curtain and forever change monitored life as they knew it. Interwoven talking heads—Leonid Brezhnev, Mikhail Gorbachev, Yuri Andropov, and others—bounce off violent Soviet news propaganda; keyhole-views of soft-core porn (Emmanuelle); Knight-riding heartthrob David Hasselhoff; and the shooting of Dallas villain-extraordinaire, J. R. Ewing. These and more meander against a backdrop of highly charged cultural change. The result is such an intense, apocalyptic surrealism that you’re never sure if what you see is fact or sci-fi.

Kilmi manages to tell his story with the creeping force of a pit bull. The progression of Finnish broadcasting penetrates deeper and deeper, and Estonian citizenry relish every moment of stolen airtime, struggling to maintain signals any way they can. Repetitive scenes of one man assembling and balancing a home-made antenna that inevitably wipes out the signals of his neighbors is deadpan comedy at its peak. Meanwhile, Estonian authorities struggle and fail to combat this internal rebellion by attempting to counteract those entering their borders with smuggled computer chips strategically placed in every imaginable body part. (We are never certain if the footage is from 30 years ago, or is, in fact, reenacted in the present.)

What makes Kilmi’s docu-comedy so believable, shocking, and profound is his ability to show and tell without blinding us with graphic details. This cunning minimalism makes palatable what could very easily veer into yet another diatribe. Perhaps this 80-minute film’s greatest strength is its ability to provoke questions in all of us, who too often take television broadcasting, the Internet, and contemporary global culture as some magical given that has always been here. Disco and Atomic War is a definite must-see for anyone who takes life seriously with a twist of comedy. Amy R. Handler
November 12, 2010