AllMovie

Filmmaker Marko Skop presents a witty portrait of a small community struggling to move into the present day for the sake of their survival in this documentary. The village of Osadne is located near the Eastern border of Slovakia where nearly all the inhabitants are Rusyns, a Slavic ethnic group that speaks its own language and has few present day survivors. As the local population ages, Osadne's future is in doubt -- Peter Soroka, the town's priest, has presided over fifty funerals but only two baptisms in the past five years, and unless people can be persuaded to come to Osadne, the village may simply disappear. With this in mind, Soroka, mayor Ladislav Mikulasko (who has headed up the local government for more than thirty-five years) and local booster Fedor Vico are eager to create a tourist attraction to lure visitors to the town. The three travel to Belgium in hopes of raising money to establish some sort of Rusyn memorial in Osadne, but dealing with bureaucracy in Brussels is more complicated than they expected. Osadne was an official selection at the 2009 BFI London Film Festival.