Past screening

Corridor # 8

Directed by: Boris Despodov
Runtime: 1hr 14min Year: 2008

Details

Directed by: Boris Despodov
Runtime: 1hr 14min Year: 2008
Country: Bulgaria
Last Screened: Sun 29th Mar 2009

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, award-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, but underlying it are the real problems of EU grand plans for a region recently at war with itself.