QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

There were a lot of unfortunate events in the final years of Soviet rule in Estonia. Like… actual s**t. A shortage of (clean) public toilets meant that often defecators had to resort to more primitive pooping locations. Faeces was everywhere, as one of the band members in the Estonian punk rock band Velikije Luki recalls in Happiness Is Living in Our Land, a documentary walking through the final years of Soviet-Estonia with the band’s history. Indrek Spungin’s film jests with visualisations and re-creations of poop-filled public toilets and feces on the floor to say the quiet part out loud: it was a shit time.

Named after the Battle of Velikiye Luki, a WWII skirmish where Estonian soldiers conscripted by both Soviet and Nazi forces preferred to lure comrades to their side instead of killing compatriots, Velikije Luki’s political etymology would prelude their legacy of arrests, KGB intimidation, banned performances, and arguably breaking up the Estonian Communist Party. The punk group released three albums, although only one of which came before the fall of the USSR.

Ivo Uukkivi, arguably the most recognisable living Estonian actor, happened to be the band’s vocalist. The founding members from 1982 were Allan Vainola, Peep Männil, and Villu Tamme. His recognisability surely made Happiness Is Living in Our Land easier to greenlight. The documentary also claims that the second-ever rock-and-roll stage dive was at a Velikije Luki concert in 1984, 20 years after the Rolling Stones’ famous dive in 1964 – and, although the veracity of this claim is dubious at best, it’s a helpful illustration of the cultural delay between the Western world and the Soviet bloc of the 1980s.

Very little source material survived through the years. Spungin solves this predicament by punctuating contemporary interviews with 8mm re-enactments and dramatisations of the stories the members tell. The bandmates are all excellent storytellers and the interviewer never gets in the way of their knack for story. Refreshingly, the interviewees even pause to reflect on the questions further. The default choice would have been cleaning up the interviews, eliminating pauses, and skipping any breaks in the “content” of choice. That would have been the anti-punk approach. Editor Taavi Aavik meets the subject material with an appropriately messy technique. Aavik does show a bit of cleverness too with a few sardonic and funny match cuts.

One of the more interesting features of Happiness is its seamless weaving of other cultural artifacts into the backdrop. Strategic Lenin quotes graffitied in the background ironically illuminate injustices and, humorously, work like a narrator in an episode of Drunk History. Footage from old Estonian films such as Kaljo Kiisk’s Madness, often considered the first modern Estonian film, appears with no title-cards and little flair. Most cultural outsiders will miss many of these references, and that’s probably okay because no matter what they accomplish their likely purpose: to appeal to the Estonian national consciousness being formed during the late USSR rule.

And naturally, the film ends by tying the band into the larger mytho-narrative of the Singing Revolution by which the Baltic countries regained their independence from the USSR through song. The documentary places Velikije Luki at the centre of this downfall following the Perestroika and Glasnost reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev. In reality, of course, it is unbelievable that Luki indirectly brought about the end of the empire. Would not the Estonian Communist Party have fallen apart anyway? Wasn’t the writing already on the wall? Similar claims have been (more convincingly) made about films like Is It Easy to Be Young? (1986), by the iconic Latvian director Juris Podnieks, for example. Gorbachev himself called that film “the first bird of Perestroika”. It’s a simplistic narrative that favours entertaining claims over historical nuance.

Happiness is Living in our Land just premiered in the Doc@PÖFF Baltic Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.