#eric baudelaire

Screenshots from Letters to Max (2012),film by Eric Baudelaire. This fascinated me, the physical existence of a nation (and a symbolic understanding of its nationality/nationhood) but the bureaucratic non-existence of a nation and its people.

“Abkhazia is something of a paradox: a country that exists, in the physical sense of the word (a territory with borders, a government, a flag, a language), yet it has no legal existence because for almost twenty years it was not recognized by any other nation state. And so Abkhazia exists without existing, caught in a liminal space, a space in between realities. Which is why my first letter to Max was something of a message in a bottle thrown at sea.”