Sidescaping Europe
Northern, Eastern or Central, Europe comes in many flavours, yet there still seem to be an idea of a monolithic identity attached to it. Whether it’s a Fiat, Volkswagen or Skoda, there is this notion pushed forward that, in the end, we are all trotting down the same road, although we might still sometimes bicker about which car is better. To quote pop culture, “in this family portrait we look pretty happy”.
Yet, the caveat is that in each group photo there are bound to be a few in the back row who appear in the picture, but are not fully seen. Beyond the rhetoric of Europeanism lies an absurd concoction of the maladjusted.
“Sidescaping Europe” zooms in on these exact characters, swept away by the political and social conjunctures of living in an era of transitions. Its goal is neither victimization, not glorification, but making space for the documentaries’ characters to claim as their own. In these films, traditional notions of time seem irrelevant in this space of continuous adaptation and coping mechanisms.
In “Gora” time is often measured in melancholy folk songs resounding across Shar Mountains where a remote village and its Slavic minority of Muslim creed can be found. The film doesn’t seek difference as Otherness, but as variation on a same tune, natural occurring beauty in the routines of the people and their community.
“The Side Street of Europe” measures time in the kilometres travelled from one town to the next by Hungarian actress Zenobia, who is performing for the Hungarian diaspora in Romania. Touching on broader themes of identity and belonging, her endless tour becomes an emblematic journey to have one’s efforts, and ultimately self, recognized.
The levels of a building like a cubist painting in the making for the past 15 years appear like clock-dials in “Batusha’s House”. Incessantly expanding without a predetermined plan, this is Kadri Batusha’s Xanadu, the mirroring image of his own convoluted life story, from his beginnings in a kebab shop, to his exile to Switzerland and plunge into the Bosnian war. A testament not only to the man and ideed Kosovo’s resilience, it also reveals and almost compulsive need to move and build forward, to take up space and mark it as one’s own.
Subversive through its dead-pan humour, “Long Echo” assembles individual portraits of the citizens into wider patterns of beliefs, behaviours and coping mechanisms. It alternates between the insider and the outsider’s perspective, between raw emotionality and perceptive observation, between the echoes of a communist past, its revolutionary present and its Western-oriented ideals for the future. As such, we get trapped in a pervasive state of emotional paralysis, a mirror image of the town’s own temporal and ideological paralysis.
With a subjective corporal perception of time and space, “All That Passes By Through a Window That Doesn't Open” beautifully portrays the silent heartsickness of a never-ending state of uncertainty. Enthusiastic promises of a better future brought about by new Eurasian high-speed train line clash with the dreary reality of the people working or waiting on its construction, living a life in transit and transition. Their daily routine feels at both times isolating and instilling a feeling of camaraderie. Ultimately, it is an exchange between seeing and being seen.
Similarly, if the metaphor of going down the same path is to stand, there is a need to negotiate the acknowledgement of people in our social and cultural blind spot, to give space in order to claim space. As it were, “objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear” and so the simple gesture of turning one’s gaze to the “sidescape” makes our peripheral vision come in full focus.
Curatorial text and films presentations by Diana Mereoiu