“Can music change the world?” is the question Tomek Lipiński, a co-founder of a Polish punk band Brygada Kryzys, is faced with at the end of the film Beats of Freedom. At the Rock(ing) Regimes Conference on February 22-23, 2018, Lipiński discussed this problem once again together with other guest speakers (Rita Safariants, Assistant Professor of Russian, St. Olaf College and Bryan Swirsky) and members of Yale faculty. View full Program
The conference was centered around three films: Assa (1987), The Plastic People of the Universe (2001), and Beats of Freedom (2010), which came from Soviet Russia, Czech Republic, and Poland, respectively. Each of these films deals with the place and role of underground rock or punk music under the communist rule and the effect it had on the collapse of the regimes of the Eastern bloc. After three screenings, the speakers gathered for a roundtable discussion, in which Yale was represented by Daria Ezerova, Krystyna Illakowicz, Karen von Kunes, Marci Shore, and Julia Titus.
