Srecko Horvat at the Greek-Macedonian border town of Idomeni. Banyak films. Some rights reserved.
Is Europe colonising itself? That’s the question posed by nomadic Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat in this two-part documentary on Al Jazeera. On a journey that takes in the streets of Athens, the valleys of South Wales, the vast forests of Romania and the (literal) corridors of power in Brussels, Horvat encounters flashpoints of conflict and resistance that all seem to be signalling towards something much bigger.
He starts in Idomeni, a sleepy village on the Greek-Macedonian border that became an unwitting symbol of the refugee crisis and Europe’s response to it. We hear from some refugees who were forcibly moved on from Idomeni where, in a very literal expression of Mario Savio’s "throw your bodies onto the gear and levers", they encamped on the train tracks, preventing the movement of goods from the Aegean sea to the heart of Europe. Did they expose a contradiction in Europe where free movement is fetishized for goods but not people? These are the questions we are invited to think about.
