What It's About:

For their final project, two Czech film students, Filip Remunda and Vit Klusak, decide to create a massive marketing campaign—complete with cheeky billboard ads, TV and radio spots, theme music, and cut-out bargain coupons—for the grand opening of a super store that doesn’t exist. Chaos ensues when 4000 people show up to find nothing but a rainbow-colored facade in an empty field, triggering disappointment, disbelief, and lots of heated discussion.

Why I Love It:

Call it post-commie performance art, anti-ad satire, or just a downright nasty practical joke, “Czech Dream” dramatizes Eastern Europe’s apparently mass desire for the conveniences of Western consumer culture, those middle-class luxuries denied to them during the long decades of Soviet oppression. Remunda and Klusak want to critique this new hunger for goods and products, not to mention the Czech Republic’s own manipulative ad campaign regarding European Union membership. Introduced by Morgan Spurlock, “Czech Dream” plays like a master class in the anatomy of materialist fantasy.