THE FILM
Directed by 4 Time Emmy Award Winning Filmmaker Jim Brown
and Narrated by Kiefer Sutherland
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FREE TO ROCK is a feature length documentary film, produced in association with the Grammy Museum Foundation, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Stas Namin Center of Moscow. And has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor and by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The film analyzes how the American cultural innovation of Rock and Roll music contributed to the end of the Cold War. FREE TO ROCK premieres on National Public Television staring May 1st, 2017 |
THE STORY
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FREE TO ROCK is a 60-minute documentary film directed by 4 time Emmy winning filmmaker Jim Brown and narrated by Kiefer Sutherland. Ten years in the making, the film explores how the soft power of Rock & Roll affected social change behind the Iron Curtain between the years 1955 and 1991, while telling the story of how the power of the music contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and helped end the Cold War.
Rock & Roll inspired teenagers behind the Iron Curtain to rebel and to demand the rights to listen, play and record rock music, and to enjoy other forms of freedom. The story follows the key |
Free to Rock explores how American Rock & Roll
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political, musical and activist players in this real-life drama as the KGB cracked down with arrests, beatings, death threats and imprisonment, while they tried to eradicate the rock virus. By 1958, the CIA directed Radio Free Europe to pump Rock & Roll across the Iron Curtain, resulting in the Kremlin erecting 2,500 radio jamming stations around the Curtain to block the music’s message and its sound of freedom. The Iron Curtain teenagers questioned why their government would prohibit the music they loved and yearned for, and then began questioning other Kremlin propaganda and communism itself.
President Jimmy Carter realized that sending rock bands to the USSR would give the Soviet youth a feeling of freedom and be an effective tool of America’s USSR in 1985, he recognized that the youth wanted this music and the freedom of expression, and began instituting his Glasnost 'openness' reforms. By 1987, the Kremlin invited Western rockers like Billy Joel to perform uncensored in the USSR. And in 1989, Gorbachev allowed a joint Soviet-American heavy-metal concert, the Moscow Music Peace Festival, organized by Moscow’s Stas Namin and America’s Doc McGhee, to be staged in Moscow’s Lenin Stadium, with 200,000 fans in celebration.
However, by 1989, the cracks in the communist system had grown too large to hold together. Outdoor rock concerts in West Berlin in 1987-88 --with the PA speakers aimed across the wall to East Berlin -- caused major riots between the East German youth and the police. After the Berlin Wall fell in November that year, Roger Waters staged the Wall Concert in Berlin for East and West Berliners, which signaled, for many, the demise of the Soviet communist system. Meanwhile, in the Baltics, a human chain of 2,000,000 people, stretching from Estonia, through Latvia and into Lithuania, held hands while singing rock songs of freedom to demand their independence from the USSR. And in December 1989, as the Czech communist system collapsed, the freely elected President Vaclav Havel, reminded everyone that, “Music was the enemy of totalitarianism.”
Finally, in 1991, one of the largest rock concerts in history, sponsored by private U.S. funds (and featuring Metallica), took place at an airfield outside of Moscow before an estimated 1,500,000 – 3,000,000 million freedom loving fans. Eleven weeks later, the Soviet communist system and its military machine collapsed without bloodshed or a civil war.
President Jimmy Carter realized that sending rock bands to the USSR would give the Soviet youth a feeling of freedom and be an effective tool of America’s USSR in 1985, he recognized that the youth wanted this music and the freedom of expression, and began instituting his Glasnost 'openness' reforms. By 1987, the Kremlin invited Western rockers like Billy Joel to perform uncensored in the USSR. And in 1989, Gorbachev allowed a joint Soviet-American heavy-metal concert, the Moscow Music Peace Festival, organized by Moscow’s Stas Namin and America’s Doc McGhee, to be staged in Moscow’s Lenin Stadium, with 200,000 fans in celebration.
However, by 1989, the cracks in the communist system had grown too large to hold together. Outdoor rock concerts in West Berlin in 1987-88 --with the PA speakers aimed across the wall to East Berlin -- caused major riots between the East German youth and the police. After the Berlin Wall fell in November that year, Roger Waters staged the Wall Concert in Berlin for East and West Berliners, which signaled, for many, the demise of the Soviet communist system. Meanwhile, in the Baltics, a human chain of 2,000,000 people, stretching from Estonia, through Latvia and into Lithuania, held hands while singing rock songs of freedom to demand their independence from the USSR. And in December 1989, as the Czech communist system collapsed, the freely elected President Vaclav Havel, reminded everyone that, “Music was the enemy of totalitarianism.”
Finally, in 1991, one of the largest rock concerts in history, sponsored by private U.S. funds (and featuring Metallica), took place at an airfield outside of Moscow before an estimated 1,500,000 – 3,000,000 million freedom loving fans. Eleven weeks later, the Soviet communist system and its military machine collapsed without bloodshed or a civil war.
One of the best ways to topple an opposite system is through an ideological offensive…through a cultural offensive. This is precisely what happened during the Cold War. That’s what led to the collapse or the USSR. - Former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin
FREE TO ROCK is produced in collaboration with the Grammy Museum, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Stas Namin Center in Russia. FREE TO ROCK has been made possible, in part by, major grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities: Exploring Human Endeavor and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Free to Rock is guided by a “blue ribbon” panel of scholars, experts and humanities advisors from the United States and former nations from behind the Iron Curtain
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INTERVIEWS and PERFORMANCES
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Interviews and Performances: FREE TO ROCK features Presidents Carter and Gorbachev, who for the first time, discuss how Rock & Roll contributed to the end of the Cold War. It also highlights interviews and/or performance by those artists from the West who played behind the Iron Curtain – Bruce Springsteen, Metallica, Billy Joel, Beach Boys, Elton John, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and the WALL Concert in Berlin, in addition to some of the prominent Iron Curtain rock pioneers who achieved popular followings and continue to perform today. These include Stas Namin (and The Flowers), Andrey Makarevich, Boris Grebenshikov, Yuri Shevchuk, Plastic People of the Universe, Valery Saifudinov, and the late Pete Anderson.
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The Rock n' Roll soundtrack to the break-up of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall shows American soft power at its strongest. The music embodied freedom, and the youth behind the Iron Curtain longed to hear it, and then to have it. - Ambassador Cynthia Schneider – Professor, Georgetown University
