Eurovision Transcarpathia (2006)

I made my first film, Eurovision Transcarpathia, about the region. Transcarpathia has been part of more than a dozen countries: during my journey I found the last inhabitants of German-speaking villages, recorded the songs of Poles, gulag stories of Hungarians, tales of Holocaust survivors, rants of Russian imperialists, independence ambitions of Ruthenes, lullabies of Romanians. I drank Soviet champagne with a mute Ukrainian grandmother who lived alone apart from her goat and cows on top of a mountain in an abandoned village: she seemed the most contented person I've ever met. When my sign language interpreter tried to explain to her the idea of my film, the only way to translate 'Europe' was as 'a place where lots of people live'. The old woman thought it sounded awful. Uzhgorod, the capital of Transcarpathia, is truly polyglot: as you walk down the cobbled streets, bustling with cross-border trade, you hear Hungarian, Ukrainian, Slovak, German, Romanian, Polish and the odd burst of Russian. The yearnings and ambitions of Eurovisionaries find their unforced, everyday realisation east of the Schengen border. 'Where is Europe?' I asked a blue-eyed girl performing a highwayman's song by a factory near some dark, green Transcarpathian woods. She shrugged. 'It's where we live.'