Film screening and conversation - El Shatt - A Blueprint for Utopia

As part of the Peripheries and Horizons series, this screening of El Shatt – A Blueprint for Utopia (2023) by director Ivan Ramljak engages with the often-overlooked exile of communities from Dalmatia, Yugoslavia (present-day Croatia) to a refugee camp in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula during World War II. By tracing this displacement across geopolitical and colonial spaces, the film foregrounds how European histories of war, ideology, and survival unfolded within—and were shaped by—colonial infrastructures across continents. 

Situating European refugee experiences within a British-controlled area of Egypt, the film explicitly reflects on the entanglements of colonial relations within Europe, revealing how its crises were experienced and negotiated in peripheral spaces. This screening and conversation with the director, art historians Maja and Reuben Fowkes, and Jelena Sofronijevic (EMPIRE LINES Podcast), invites audiences to consider El Shatt as a space where alternative social and political imaginaries briefly took form.

This event is part of the “Postcolonial?” Public Programme co-developed by the museum with a circle of experts, practitioners, artists and educators.