This is for anyone who still believes that advertising relates to anything at all outside of its own world of make-believe. For their graduation project, Czech film students Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda invented a hypermarket, Cesky Sen - ‘Czech Dream’. They smartened themselves up with haircuts and suits to look like managers, endured a cringeworthy photographic session, got their store a logo, product branding, an ad campaign and focus groups to test their flyers and posters. They even got a hilariously banal supermarket song complete with children’s choir. Then they waited to see if people would turn up for the opening of a non-existent superstore; 4,000 people did.
It builds to a fascinating portrait of a society in transition. I’m unsure which is more unsettling, the sunshine families spouting platitudes to win a supermarket trolley-fill or the self-important ‘creatives’: if the ad works, says one, ‘we’ll decide what several thousand people will do on May 31st at 10 am. That’s pretty cool’. Absurd too are the qualms people have about the project. One designer is happy to design a poster for a non-existent supermarket but is unhappy about including the words ‘you won’t go home empty-handed’, because ‘we don’t lie in advertising’.
Without any apparent irony, the review copy for this satire on advertising and gullibility came with its key selling points highlighted. It says it will appeal to ‘doc fans and creatives, festival goers, a politically active audience, students and those with an interest in the Czech Republic and in particular Prague, one of the UK’s favourite citybreak destinations’. If you’re in that lot then this is for you.
Documenting the largest consumer hoax the Czech Republic has ever seen in which Filip Remunda and Vit Klusak set out to explore the psychological and manipulative powers of consumerism by creating an ad campaign for something that didn't exist - in this case a new hypermarket, backed by advertising jingles, flyers, billboards, web and TV advertising. A funny and provocative look at the effects of rampant consumerism on a post-communist society, relevant anywhere.
Kolya 
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Czech Dream 
