2020 #DESERTEDCOUNTRY

The reality: the Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has the goal for Ukraine to apply to the EU in 2020. The Dystopia: a fictional Canadian director comes in this year to the Ukraine, where his grandparents were born. Though once the visa and migration freedom for Ukrainians in the EU is established the country is orphaned – almost 40 million people have left the land. Only a handful of souls are left behind, each for another reason. A girl – the only candidate for her country – prepares for a beauty competition, an engineer arranges to populate the country with robots. A Chinese researcher, in turn, is weighing up the chances for a colonisation by resettles from China.

In his low budget mockumentary, the Ukrainian filmmaker Korniy Gricyuk exaggerates the phenomenon of mass migration from his homeland to satiric levels. The potholes on the road of dreams for a better future and the stagnation in the face of war and economic problems become abundantly clear in the exodus depicted here. But migration is a real problem. NaF