FLOTEL EUROPA

An enormous ship lies moored in Copenhagen’s harbour: the “Flotel Europa”. In the early nineties hundreds of war refugees from Yugoslavia called it their home, if only temporarily. Shy Vladimir was also on board back then. Along with his mother and big brother, he recorded video messages for his father, who’d stayed behind, telling him about everyday life on the ship, about getting good marks in school, nights spent together watching TV in the common room and the monotony of the windowless cabins. Twenty years later the shy boy has grown up to be a movie director. Vladimir Tomić’s masterful found footage film combines old VHS home movies made by the occupants of “Flotel Europa” with his own voiceover narration to chronicle the fate of his fellow asylum seekers and chart the wider dissolution of a nation as reflected in this microcosm. FLOTEL EUROPA’s narrative of war, displacement and destructive nationalism is closely interwoven with a coming-of-age story that oscillates between very humorous and very touching moments. The tale of young Vladimir’s first love, told almost parenthetically, paints a nuanced group portrait of those involved and their time, steering clear of the one-sided depiction of refugee life so familiar in the media.