Buried Land Trailer (2010)

Trailer for Buried Land, which is available through Tribeca Film Festival Virtual.

An inventive hybrid of fiction and documentary, Buried Land takes us on a journey to Visoko, a town in Bosnia that claims that beneath its three surrounding mountains lies the most extraordinary discovery of our age: A valley of ancient pyramids predating Egypt. The people of Visoko are energized by the prospect of having a new cultural identity to promote—one that has no connection to the recent memories of war—and a tourist industry begins to bloom with the news of the pyramids' still-unconfirmed existence. It is amid this furor that an American film crew arrives to make a film with the help of a young émigré, Emir, who is returning to his native land for the first time since he fled during the war. Controversy mounts as the townspeople fear they'll be portrayed by the American director like the people of Kazakhstan in Borat, and Emir develops a kinship with an attractive tourist agent.

Mirroring its own vacillation between fact and fiction, Buried Land depicts a town full of people caught between the real and the imagined. Fittingly, then, directors Steven Eastwood and Geoffrey Alan Rhodes (who "plays" the movie-within-a-movie's director) seek to determine the role of faith in capturing what can not yet be proven, and they constantly challenge our perceptions of the difference between what we know to be real and what in our hearts we can only hope is real.