Paradise on earth

Director: Hans Madej
2003

Photographer Hans Madej discovers an almost abandoned location in East Poland, where he meets a group of old people for whom the Bible was like a script for their lives. In the 1930's, prophet farmer Eliasz assigned them Biblical roles and told them to set up the future capital of the world, paradise on earth, in a nearby forest clearing. A few years later, Eliasz disappeared without a trace. For the villagers, he remained the principle of hope with which they bore revolution, war and their consequences for more than 60 years. The photographer's adventurous search for Eliasz takes him to the Stalinist prison camps in Siberia. Fascinating images take us to a foreign, unknown world in which Biblical myth and reality become intermingled. Suddenly, the fate of these people far from our modern life appears like a parable of the search for the meaning of life.