Übergordnete Werke und Veranstaltungen

Der Chinesische Markt

HU / DE 2000

The increase in time, money and freedom gained from Western European trade markets leads to an inane waste of resources and potential within the Eastern version of the “free market.” A prominent example is the Chinese Market in Budapest, which as the name suggests, is almost exclusively run by Chinese traders. Customers come from the various Eastern European countries. The traders usually manage to make a small profit off the goods that they riskily transport across the respective (trade) borders. This income is on the one hand, a basis for their subsistence (or even survival), and on the other, makes the next trade journey possible. Every day, thousands of people kill their time busily transporting cheap imitations of appliances, cosmetics, clothing and shoes made by well-known manufacturers, across hundreds of kilometers. “The film by Zoran Solomun and Vladimir Blazevski makes the abstract process of globalization tangible via a concrete description of the socalled Chinese Market in Budapest. In the shadow of the global flow of funds, a form of commodity circulation has come into existence here since 1992 that has nothing in common with the stock market transactions of the “global players”. It rather resembles an early capitalistic form of small trade. The film depicts people living on this trade. They come from Romania, Macedonia, Bosnia and other former Easternbloc countries, and cover hundreds of kilometers with great effort in order to purchase cheap goods on the market and resell them in their homelands for a small profit. The film succeeds in finding concrete images for economic and social relations without reducing their complexity in any way. In numerous snapshot scenes of the market, of border crossings and private homes, the film describes the social background and survival strategies of people struggling to make a living under the pressure of these new economic conditions. The film impressively or reveals a network of intersecting biographies and trade routes, thus rendering a representation of the structural dimension of economic interrelations, as well as the existential dimension of human fates that are subject to these interrelations.” (Reason given by the jury: Birgit Kohler, Mark Stöhr, Jan Verwoert, 25th Duisburger Filmwoche 2001)

Zoran Solomun, Bladimir Blazevski (HU/DE), 2000, 93 min., OF mit. dt. UT.

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