El Shatt - A Blueprint for Utopia
Original title: El Shatt - nacrt za utopiju
Year: 2023
Language: Croatian
Available subtitles: English
Genre: History
Country: Croatia, Serbia
Runtime: 98 min
Status: Released
Hundreds of frozen and starved people floating on boats in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea fleeing from the war... Familiar scenes that we are used to seeing in recent times. But the year is 1944, and the refugees are traveling from Europe to Africa. After Italian capitulation, and before the arrival of German army, 28,000 Dalmatian Croats left their home villages and towns to live for two years under the tents in the middle of Egyptian desert, in a kind of a communist model village that was formed to show the Allies how the new Yugoslavia will look like when the war ends. This is a story about them.
Director: Ivan Ramljak
Screenplay: Ivan Ramljak
Cinematography: Boris Poljak
Editing: Jelena Maksimović
Sound Design: Vladimir Živković
Producer: Tibor Keser
Coproducers: Iva Plemić-Divjak, Mladen Kovačević, Sunčica Fradelić
Production: Kompot
Coproduction: Horopter Film Production (Serbia), Kino klub Split (Croatia)
Festivals
Festival mediteranskog filma Split// DokLeipzig
Reviews
“A fascinating and impressively mounted delve into a long-forgotten piece of communist history” Business Doc Europe
“meticulous and inspiring” Cineuropa