El Shatt – A Blueprint for Utopia

El Shatt – A Blueprint for Utopia/ El Shatt – nacrt za utopiju 
Ivan Ramljak, Croatia, Serbia, 2023, 96’

In the heart of a desert, 28,000 Dalmatian Croats, evacuated to Egypt from Italy after its
capitulation, create a model for post-war Yugoslavia.
Hundreds of frozen and starved people floating on boats in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea
fleeing from the war… Familiar scenes that we are used to seeing in recent times. But the year is
1944, and the refugees are travelling from Europe to Africa. After Italian capitulation, and before the
arrival of German army, 28,000 Dalmatian Croats left their home villages and towns to live for two
years under the tents in the middle of Egyptian desert, in a kind of a communist model village that
was formed to show the Allies how the new Yugoslavia will look like when the war ends. This is a
story about them.
“I believe in the thesis that the camp in El Shatt was, among other things, a kind of model-settlement,
serving the purpose of demonstrating to the Allies what Yugoslavia would look like once the war
ended. It was an attempt to create a utopian community or, as Savka Dabcevic Kucar said on a
couple of occasions, “if the idea of communism was ever realized anywhere, then it was there”.
Fascinatingly, several of the survivors told me that their life in the desert was better than it is today.” –
Ivan Ramljak

Screened with: I Draw A Line, The Sky Will Be Above. #3, Davorin Marc, Slovenia, Croatia, 2021, 3’

Ivan Ramljak will join us after the screening for a Q&A.