The Wild East of the western USSR – the story of Baltic resistance in the late 1980s takes on a youthful energy through the sound of rock music in seasoned filmmaker Kilmi’s dramedy. Following in the footsteps of Juris Podnieks’ seminal Is It Easy to Be Young? (1986), the film vibrates with chords of conscience, politics and riffs.

Summer, 1987. The blue, black and white flag is banned; Soviet Estonia’s physical borders are marked by barbed wire, while its mental ones are drawn by feeble myths and absurdity. Yet a group of young people are determined to make music. At their centre is 17-year-old Mihkel, who is in love with Liisa. His friend and rival Hendrik, whose band has just broken up, suggests forming a new band together in a bid to impress the foreign music producers invited to the festival. With Latvian athlete Ingvars joining them, they set out to make it happen. Amid competition, absurdity and chaos, they face one challenge after another, discovering their true selves – and a little taste of revolution – along the way.

To be or not to be? At the heart of this coming-of-age film, brimming with youthful drive, swagger and warm comedy, is Mihkel Raud’s popular 2008 autobiographical novel, which delved into the musical subcultures of Eastern Europe under Soviet rule. Rock music is more than a soundtrack to youthful aspirations – it is a language of freedom, a search for identity and a quiet, yet ever-louder, resistance to the system. This fascinating, complex chapter of Baltic history is revealed not only through the prism of political events, but also through the lives of people who were still too young to shape history, yet brave and unpredictable enough to leave their mark on it. In this ode to the ‘Rock-upation’, Estonian and Latvian filmmakers meet on screen, while for RIGA IFF audiences it marks a reunion with Kilmi, director of the cult favourite The Dissidents (2017) and the documentary My Father the Spy (2019).