A small project in Brestovo, Bulgaria. We were invited by our Citizenlab partner Pavlina to participate in a small project “Stepping out of the box”.

In the communist era about 3000 people used to live in the village of Brestovo. After 1990 all young people went to the city. Now only about 90 elder people, most of them woman live in Brestovo. During three days two totally different worlds met, artists mostly from Western Europe and the local citizens. Together we cooked, danced and told each other stories.

In EYE film museum in Amsterdam on June 22 we had the final conference of the Real Life project. About 100 people from different countries were present. Among them people of the top of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and representatives of  the Dutch Erasmus+ Agency who funded the project One of the participants called the event “the best conference that I ever visited”.

Later in June we were told that the Real Life project would be presented as a best practice at the Council of Europe.