Time Shelter (Vremeubezhishche) · Georgi Gospodinov · Bulgaria (2020)
A clinic for the past opens in Zurich, offering Alzheimer patients a chance to relive their safest memories by recreating perfectly detailed decades, including the furniture of the 60s, the smell of the 70s, or the specific light of a lost afternoon.
But soon healthy people want to escape the present too. Entire nations start holding referendums on which decade they want to live in, turning nostalgia into a political tool that threatens to replace the future.
Written by Georgi Gospodinov, this International Booker Prize winner is a beautiful and melancholic exploration of why we are so obsessed with the past, and why it can be a dangerous place to live. It is a brilliant warning for a continent currently trying to find its way between memory and reality.