ABSTRACT
In 2017, the Eastern European queer migrant appeared and became successful on the Western (British) screen. Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (2017) fulfilled the dreams of not only the Western viewer about the romanticised, orientalised Eastern European other, but also the imaginations of the Eastern European (queer) migrant about the West as a liberal utopia where personal happiness, fulfilment and acceptance are possible, unlike in the ‘dead’, post-communist, heteronormative countries of their own. As opposed to God’s Own Country, Eastern European representations of queer westward migration tend to deconstruct the Iron Curtain heritage of popular imaginations about the West as a dreamland of liberty, consumer society, and freedom over one’s political, ideological and cultural choices. This chapter reads examples of queer migration represented in Eastern European cinema, and their reflection on and deconstruction of the Western dreamland, in the light of God’s Own Country. It starts with Another Way (Makk, 1982), representing the intact and powerful ‘West-as-a-utopia’ image as seen from behind the Iron Curtain, and continues with encounters between the East and West which mainly take place in the Eastern European context, and – although not yet shattering the (post)-communist cultural imagination – suggest disconnectivity and miscommunication, as in Take a Deep Breath (Marinković, 2004) and Beyond the Hills (Mungiu, 2012). When the (queer) migrant reaches the West and the imagined land becomes a reality, the depictions turn to disappointment, disillusionment, and, in many cases, both geographical and psychological retreat to the unbearable home country. The chapter analyses how in Go West (Imamovic, 2005) and Land of Storms (Császi, 2014) the experienced reality of the West contradicts its image as constructed from a post-communist viewpoint.
