The "most succesful" spoof in Czech history hits a chord in Locarno

The weekly The Economist has called it one of the funniest European films of the year and the most successful spoof in Czech history: we are of course talking about Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda's "Czech Dream" - a new documentary showing how two film students fooled hundreds of Czech shoppers to believe in a non-existent new mall - with extraordinarily funny results. Following initial success at home, the film went on to its international premiere at Locarno last week and we caught up with one of the filmmakers, Filip Remunda, via telephone to get a sense of the mood at the prestigious fest.

The "most succesful" spoof in Czech history hits a chord in Locarno

Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda

"We had an opportunity to show the film to three-and-a-half thousand viewers, and they reacted to the whole film with laughter and clapping, making it clear the film was easily understandable on the international level."

What elements were there that the international public, in particular, picked-up on?

'Czech Dream'

"Well, someone said that he had read an article about Czech Dream saying it was about rampant consumerism in Eastern Europe - the Czech Republic. But, after seeing the film he remarked it was more or less about the situation in the whole world - that topics discussed in the film were important not only for us but also for Germany, Italy, Switzerland - even the United States."

Themes that are evoked so cleverly in the film include the role of advertising and marketing on our lives, something Filip Remunda has likened to Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale "The Emperor's New Clothes". The images of the world that we are presented by advertisers are quite literally dreams - often vapid ones at that - devoid of true content. We all pretend there's deeper substance but in reality there is not. In Czech Dream, it's amazing how far some people will go to be fooled - more than a year ago posters for the fictitious new hypermarket said openly "Don't come." But people - once on the bandwagon - simply refused to believe that the hypermarket didn't exist.

Finally, many international reviewers of Czech Dream - including the Economist - have noted the remarkable lack of protest with which many Czech shoppers accepted the hypermarket was all a hoax. Abandoning the field where they had expected to find the best deals in town, shoppers simply moved on to a nearby department store to salvage what they could of a dream popped like a bubble.

"Most angry people did their shopping some 500 metres from our film set. We found our leaflets and flags and promotional material for Czech Dream in the garbage by the nearby Tesco. They had done their shopping there."