"[3] Caught in the middle between two aggressively expansionist superpowers, Nazi Germany and the Stalinist USSR, and pledged to the Soviet Union by the secret clauses in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the Nazis and the Soviets, Russian forces invaded and annexed the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940, after the beginning of World War II.

[4] As was the case in Latvia and Lithuania, by the end of the war more than a quarter of the Estonian population had been deported, executed, or had fled the country.

During the turbulent decades that followed, music became a powerful unifying force in the occupied Baltic states - a means of preserving each country’s national identity, as well as a tool for political resistance in the face of cultural genocide.

The revolutionary songs they created anchored Estonia’s struggle for freedom, which was ultimately accomplished in 1991 without the loss of a single life.

[7] Combining interviews of movement leaders and Estonian citizens with rare archival footage from the period of Soviet occupation, The Singing Revolution accounts one small nation’s dramatic rebirth alongside its neighbors Latvia and Lithuania where similar events took place.