2010 | 82 min | Czech Republic
U.S. Premiere
Czech provocateur Vit Klusák is at it again. Co-director of the 2004 documentary comedy Czech Dream about the opening of a fake hypermarket, he has turned his sardonic attentions to another micro-front in the globalization skirmishes. In September 2009, Hyundai inaugurated its latest factory at the foot of the Beskid mountains in a Czech village of cabbage fields and pasturelands with less than one thousand inhabitants. Nošovice’s bucolic heart was carved out when the Korean automobile manufacturer pit neighbor against neighbor and forced the principle landowners to sell and make way for the mechanized behemoth. Motivated as much by activism as by a sense of the absurd, Klusák gains unprecedented access to the shiny new plant and to the now altered lives of the Nošovice villagers. Combining cinematic flourishes normally reserved for feature films, Brechtian techniques of participatory drama, and old-fashioned journalistic muckraking, Klusák shows how Hyundai broke its corporate promise to contribute “all the best for the world.” Stick around through the end credits for the director’s hilarious sauerkraut commercial.
Part of the series Inventing Home
Co-presented by the Czech Center New York