Absolut Warhola

Located somewhere between Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine is Europe’s only Pop Art museum. Stanislaw Mucha’s documentary film traces the roots of America’s pop icon Andy Warhol which reach as far as Medzilaborce and its neighbouring villages – his parents’ home before they left for the New World. “Yes, the Warhols live in Miková, the proudest people under the sun, ever since they heard on television that their Andy wasn’t just a house painter but an artist of world renown," says the director, who wandered into this forgotten region in the early 1990s during his travels across Eastern Slovakia. One of the branches of the huge Warhol clan made its way across the ocean, but all the rest stayed behind in a remote village where, if you’re not a related to your neighbour, you’re taken for a foreigner, and where one bottle of plum brandy can be exchanged for ten wristwatches. Andy’s cousins, uncles and aunts only have a hazy idea about their famous relative, but they’re eager to assert what they know all the same. They have their own name for this controversial artist, who has remained their very own “Andrejko” and, in using it, the old settlers and their descendants underline their detachment from a world so incredibly far away.