LFF: Eight Postcards from Utopia

My favorite films tend to be those that I didn't see coming. Eight Postcards from Utopia is one of those movies.

It's a found-footage documentary, meaning it collects only material that already exists without filming anything new. In this case, that footage is a selection of old post-socialist Romanian advertisements. By combining them together with wit, warmth, empathy, and nuance, directors Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Radu Jude have crafted a revelatory island in time that reveals the hopes and dreams of an entire nation discovering itself.

Advertisements are the greatest lie of the modern age. They're a deception so total that, at worst, we model our lives around the promises they make. At the same time, they're an honest reflection of our collective aspirations and greedy desires. By collecting a vast array of snippets from two tumultuous decades, Jude and Ferencz-Flatz look past the artifice and shine a light on what Romanian society valued, feared, and loved in its recent history.

What struck me most about Eight Post Cards from Utopia is how it could just as easily be about my homeland. Finland emerged from the shadow of the Soviet Union earlier than Romania, yet our cultural landscape looked much the same at this time. So many things now seem quaint, yet I remember how massive they felt at the time. (Pepsi in one liter bottles, madness!)

Yet this is not a celebration of capitalist folklore. It's much smarter than that. Jude's selection of advertisements tells a story, and it's not a jubilation. Watch, for example, how quickly the opulence and western influence turns sour. In the blink of an eye, we go from spending money to make money to loans, insurances, and a system designed to keep the poor in place. It is an indictment of a broken economy written in its own language.

This is more than a fascinating documentary. It's a time capsule worth preserving. A window into a period of European history that speaks to us all, even if its focal point is in a small country looking for an identity. It shows how much has happened in such a short amount of time, and how quickly we lost our heads in the promise of opportunity. By using the ads themselves as a shared language, Eight Postcards from Utopia eloquently guides into the past and shows us how badly we were deceived by both forces external and internal.

Eight Postcards from Utopia lasts a mere 60 odd minutes, yet it leaves behind a conversation that should not fade. It asks us to consider our part in the cultural landscape. Are we destined to be mere consumers, tossed around at the whims of the marketing machine, or can we strive to be more?