Today we see them with a tourist’s eye – or we don’t see them at all, like the Palace of the Republic in Berlin. “Palace for the People” visits five emblematic buildings of the socialist era: massive stone bodies, whose facades and interiors, configuration of rooms and furniture, decor and functionality invariably aimed for the representation of political systems and values. Superlative power buildings – some shooting up high like the Lomonosov University in Moscow, some sprawling like Ceauşescu’s palace in Bucharest.
Guided tours are always a form of return, a kind of retrospective, the affective connection to what is gone. With a sharp eye for historic architectural quirks and characteristic features, Georgi Bogdanov and Boris Missirkov take us to places that are, however historical they may seem, still haunted by the ghosts of the visions they were once built for. Places soaked with futures that never materialised or materialised quite differently from what was envisioned.
Lukas Stern
Nominated for the Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize and the MDR Film Prize
The screening on 31 October, 17:00, is a special screening supported by MDR.
