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.

Geoffrey Alan Rhodes' experimental films have been exhibited internationally. He directed the award-winning educational documentary Made Over In America and makes his feature fiction debut with Buried Land.

Steven Eastwood's previous films include Seminar in Film Sound (2008), Of Camera (2003), and Those Who Are Jesus (2001), which was nominated for a Grierson documentary award. Buried Land is his first feature.

Rhodes: Buried Land is a continuation of ideas I have been exploring through gallery media art. What first fascinated me in the story of the people of Visoko was the existential parable of a people transformed by a pyramid that could not be seen, but only imagined. I wanted to capture in the film the relationship between cinema production and the pursuit of a dream: both strenuous pursuits by a community to manifest something from an idea. Taking inspiration from current trends in realist cinema, such as the work of Jia Zhang Che and Claire Denis, and the films of Jean Rouch and Eric Rohmer, we searched for a method of filmmaking that could honor both the real people of Visoko and the motivations of their dreams.

Eastwood: Often I find myself looking for the possibility of intersection between cinema and the lived world, for events where the actual experiences of a group or an individual might be developed—completed, even—by the lens of filmmaking. Kiarostami's Close-Up is a big influence in this respect, as is neo-realist cinema. The people of the town of Visoko have already been subject to mediation from the outside, and certainly the trap of poor representation seemed to surround us on all sides when we conducted our research, reaching its zenith when the production was likened to Borat. And so we placed the wild imaginary and the folly of filmmaking, with its inevitable manipulations, back into the story of Buried Land, asking, how does one document or articulate something whose truth has many sides? I enjoy that no two audience members having watched the film could come to the same decision as to the validity of the pyramid claims, nor for that matter who was acting and who wasn't. The film is not about whether the pyramids are true or false.