Rouge Nowa Huta

Built in 1949, near to Krakow, the metallurgy complex of Nowa Huta was to symbolise the glorious future of Communism. Those who worked there could count on having a comfortable apartment with all the modern fittings. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, this travesty of the Communist city became a museum-city. Trips on the buses of the epoch along vast pinky-grey avenues, screenings of propaganda films to the glory of Nowa Huta and Joseph Stalin, songs extolling the happy Nowa Huta life, training sessions for the cheerleaders, the legend of the dog-man, a guided tour of the steel “cathedral”, the 1,000 hectares of the Lenin blast-furnaces, the Western tourist has all the time to plunge into the icy depths of real socialism and fully taste its retro-style charm. (Yann Lardeau)