One Day in Europe

I watched the movie in Istanbul Film Festival with the presence of the director Hannes Stöhr - I was sitting just three rows up from where Mr. Stöhr sat. Anyway, I liked the movie's sense of internationality, its funny but balanced approach towards national differences, its respect to the nationalistic views and its notion of Europe not being a continent just constituted by EU-countries.

The humor of the movie is built upon international differences and similarities. It bears some bias on nations but it doesn't emphasize them, it just plays with them to create humor. At the end, I liked the movie and I liked Mr. Stöhr after listening to his conference about his movie. Not an important movie after all, but helps enjoying being European with a cute humor.

I've just watched the DVD of this movie. I feel it interesting, and I consider the difference of the different country's culture and languages is similar to China. But unlike European divided countries, China is huge country with 23 different provinces. Each province is equals the size of an European country. Each Chinese province has its unique culture, localisms, dialects,etc. Especially in the southern provinces, even in one province, people from different cities or counties can't understand each other if they just speak their own dialect. Like this movie, people in Europe usually could speak English. In China, people usually could speak "mandarin" which is the Chinese official language. But at Guangdong or Hongkong, people prefer Cantonese to mandarin. So usually when people from northern arrive in Hongkong at first time, he or she will find that the native may understand what he says, but he he could understand nothing of what the native says. That's just about the language the Han People, in fact, there are 56 different nationalities in China. Welcome to China!

One day in Europe shows stories set in four European countries. All of them involve thievery in some way or the other. The protagonists are strangers in the respective country. For none of them their stay turns out as planned. With sympathetic mockery a small share of each of the different cultures is highlighted. The film uses characteristics typically attributed to the countries and weaves numerous funny events around, without becoming stereotypical. Especially the police scenes are fun to watch.

Straight forward directing and a good ensemble cast. The script cleverly uses the potential provided by language barriers. All in all the movie is quite entertaining and shows why Europe really is to enjoy.