Beats of Freedom

Colour, 35 mm
Poland, 2010, 75 min
Section: 2010: A Musical Odyssey

Synopsis

Music and freedom are linked by thousands of stories. This documentary, with its subtitle How to Bring Down a Totalitarian Regime with the Aid of a Home-made Amplifier, summarises the way in which rock music in Poland bolstered the country’s sense of independence from the 1960s to the fall of the communist regime. British journalist and writer Chris Salewitz goes off in search of various stories: from the first Polish protest song by Czesław Niemen, the court cases against Polish hippies and the onset of the punk rebellion, to the Solidarity years and the state of emergency. Twenty thousand people descended on the town of Jarocin for the rock festival, the largest of its kind in Eastern Europe, and the Polish government failed to keep the rock scene under control. The film, coming from a country where rock has also been an escape from Catholicism, is full of strong, often absurd tales. The censors branded Maanam’s song lyrics as an allegory of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and banned them .... A film about music as the bearer of hope, featuring songs by the bands Tilt, Brygada Kryzys, T. Love, Maanam, Kult, Republika, Lady Pank, Izrael, 1984, Siekiera and Dezerter.

About the director

Wojciech Słota organised rock concerts and festivals in the early Nineties; he was a manager and also established a recording studio. In the film sphere he edited numerous documentaries and features, and was the artist behind The Thousandth Anniversary versus the Millennium (Tysiąclecie kontra milenium, 2006), Miners from Piastow (Górnicy z Piasta, 2006) and the documentary series A History of Polish Rock (Historia polskiego rocka, 2008). Music journalist Leszek Gnoiński has worked for important Polish media, from dailies to music websites. He has also written bestsellers on music, and his Encyclopedia of Polish Rock (as co-author) has seen four editions. He worked with Wojciech Słota on a series for the Discovery Historia Channel entitled The History of Polish Rock (2008).