Corridor X

Corridor X is a double screen road movie reiterating a passage that formed the collective memory of migration before the Yugoslavian Wars in the 1990s. As part of the Timescapes project, the road movie explored the “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity” in Ex-Yugoslavia. Departing from Munich via Salzburg, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, Nis, Skopje, Veles, Thessalonica, this was the classic migration route that, before 1990, migrants and Western European tourists took in the summer.

The “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity” was destroyed in the war. It became a warfront itself. Subsequently, the European Union reconstructed the Highway as part of the Trans-European Infrastructural Programme. As Nebosja Vilic stated in a car interview: Why did the EU destroy the highway in the first place? To reconstruct it? The situation of mobility and migration after the Yugoslavian wars has fundamentally shifted toward immobility.

The travelogue is combined with images of the video activist group Videa from Turkey, who was invited to the Timescapes project. They focus on forced migration in Turkey providing three case studies: the forced migration of Greeks in Turkey, the forced migration of villagers for infrastructural projects, the forced migration in Turkey of Kurdish people from Hakkari on the Eastern border to Iran.

Angela Melitopoulos
01:20:00