PRL de Luxe + Corridor #8 (with Q&A)
Venue: Showroom 3
Friday 07 November 2008 12:00
Participants: Sean Farnel
PRL de Luxe
Few people know that the Polish city of Cracow has another face - a district called Nowa Huta , a model for a communist city. Tourists bored with the usual historical attractions, can choose an alternate trip into the absurdities of communist times. Poland is undergoing a quiet flux before our eyes. Lets just hope the tourists get it.
Corridor#8
With much fanfare and little follow-up, in 1997 the EU launched Corridor #8 a massive project to build a road connecting the Black Sea to the Adriatic and the people of Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania to each other for the first time. Ten years on, not much has happened, and the residents along the proposed route are not sure what to make of it after all, who said they wanted to be connected up in the first place? In this remarkable, funny, multiaward-winning road movie about a road that doesn’t exist, director Boris Despodov paints a memorable mosaic of life inside unified Europe, where gravediggers don’t trust Albanians, and abandoned tunnels are used for growing mushrooms. The stirring Balkan soundtrack reflects some of the absurdities of this tale and underlying it are the all too grim repercussions of a region recently at war with itself.