***Advanced tickets for Thursday, June 19 at 6:45 p.m. have sold out.  Standby tickets will be available at the AFI Silver box office approximately 45 minutes prior to showtime.  Tickets are not guaranteed and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.*** 

Take one fragmentary road, three suspicious national neighbors and one mischievous filmmaker and you have the ingredients for an absurdly funny and engaging look at the new “unified” Europe.

In 1997, the European Union commissioned Corridor #8, an extraordinarily ambitious rail and road system intended to join Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania—neighboring countries that, logically, should already have been connected. The effort would create a pathway between the Black and Adriatic seas, put an end to the wariness between the nations and lift the economic hopes of working-class residents along its route. Or so it was hoped.

Ten years and millions of euros later, progress is scarcely visible. An incomplete tunnel in the Bulgarian town of Gyueshevo is used to grow mushrooms and store cheese, rather than connect two villages as had been intended. Threats of blood feuds along the Albanian roadside expose growing cultural unrest. And, despite the hyperbole, proclamations of progress and continued promises made by visiting delegates, train travel between Bulgaria and Macedonia is impossible despite their capital cities, Sofia and Skopje, being just 100 miles apart.

In this remarkable debut feature, Bulgarian filmmaker Boris Despodov journeys along the haphazard Corridor #8 to expose the ironies and absurdities of the massive infrastructural project and to reveal three countries whose people remain deeply suspect of each other—and even more so of the European Union.

—Sky Sitney