Recently and quite by happenstance, I learned of an animated documentary called Pelikan Blue. I’ve always considered myself a Pelikan enthusiast, a history lover, and a fan of cinema. Pelikan Blue unexpectedly combines these interests with a visual style similar to the 1990s MTV cartoons prevalent during my teenage years. The Iron Curtain, popularized by Winston Churchill in 1946, was a political, military, and ideological barrier that divided the communist Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies from the democratic West during the Cold War. When the Iron Curtain began to fall in the late 1980s, it brought new freedoms, like the ability to travel to a previously restricted Western Europe. However, traveling was very expensive, posing a challenge for people eager to explore. Pelikan Blue is a humorous yet nostalgic story of three young Hungarians who started creating fake train tickets utilizing Pelikan’s blue carbon copy paper in order to travel but speaks more broadly to the experiences of a whole generation of Hungarians. The documentary is currently making the rounds on the film festival circuit.
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