The East we deal with in this section is not a homogenous geopolitical space. The East is made of the countries that were a part of the Soviet Union, of the members of the Warsaw Pact, but also of the Balcans. It is a combination of different cultures, traditions, languages, national histories and artistic and literary legacies.

The East is primarily an imaginary space, part of the fantasies of the citizens of Fortress Europe. It develops «where Europe ends without ever having started». The East is an indistinct place from where the migrants who reach our coasts come, all those people who illegally cross our borders, the nurses, windshields washers, workers and prostitutes who fill our cities. It is a world on the borders of the West, where access to the realm of apparent prosperity appears increasingly distant, while at the same time being so close.
While the three movies we present in this section represent only a small portion of a flourishing Eastern Europan cinematography, they force us to rethink the dichotomy between the East and the West. Their titles emphasize in a vivid and at times ironic way the strange and bizarre alchemies between different identites and cultures. At the same time, they highlight the sometimes unforeseen outcomes that can result from a combination of different cultures and value systems that are distant from eachother.

What happens when a gipsy finds out he’s a fervent Communist in 1970s Albania? And if one of the cores of African-American identity, hip hop, derives from a traditional Hungarian dance? Can a bicycle trip across half of Europe to Bulgaria restore to memory the stories of all those men and women who, in the second half of the 20th century, have decided to cross the border between the East and the West?