Off The Wall - Concept

Over the last five years, various film-makers in Eastern Europe have made artistically significant works shaped by a common past and shared experiences. This generation of directors, born from the 1970s onwards, spent their childhoods in the last throes of the communist system. The Iron Curtain, pioneer summer camps, songs and mass rallies, and communist imagery populated their world. These were the symbolic projections of a universe that collapsed at the end of the 1980s.

Today in their films they present their personal view of growing up in a system that collapsed 25 years ago along with the main physical representation of that world: the Berlin Wall.

These films address the fascination projected by idealization of the West, attractive images filtered through the cracks of the wall. But when the wall fell down, so did these illusions, and the people on the other side started facing a completely new and unexpected reality of transition to capitalistic system. Simultaneously, these films show the people on the Western side not only how their Eastern counterparts really lived, but also a mirrored image of themselves.