MACEDONIA DREAMING (Macedonia, 2004)
Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1991. For Macedonia too the difficult transition to capitalism and democracy began. Initially the country was able to stand apart from the Yugoslavian civil wars, but ultimately it was not able to escape ethnic tensions and military conflicts. To this day Macedonia is pictured in the media as a directionless and corrupt land. Ivan Blazhev wants to disprove this stereotype. He spent the two years on the eve of the fifteenth anniversary of the country’s independence travelling through the land of his birth, photographing the people, their activities, funerals, parties and all the other things which compose daily life in Macedonia. In this way he wants to show that his country is an infinite collection of personal lives rather than a geographical and political cliché.
