To me all of them symbolized Warhol's well-known verdict, "In the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes". In the case of Miková, however, those fifteen minutes have lasted for decades already, that's as long as film crews took turns at knocking at doors there.

Ján Závacký, whose "World Tractor" made him the star of most any of these films, sums it up beautifully in I am from Nowhere: "If I had known, in 1969, when I started to build this house that so much filming will take place here, I would have made the rooms much bigger, so that all the lights and cameras and the whole crew that films fit in." Of course it was tempting to make a film solely about the weirdly funny connection between Warhol and Miková, a film based on the humor of its sometimes rather eccentric protagonists, yet I wanted to take a deeper look into the microcosm of the village. As Heinrich Böll wrote: "In any village the entire world is contained, and the magic of things local mirrors all the greater relations within a world in eventful motion."

I believe, though, the story of I am from Nowhere is not only therefore relevant to a worldwide audience, but most of all because it is a universal story with valid meaning for anybody: it is the archetypal tale of a "rich American uncle". For the people of Micová Warhol has assumed almost messianic proportions in that he delivers them from provincial obscurity, spreading hope among them all. That hope again is fertile ground for the dreams the villagers have, and thus this phenomenon became the actual central theme of the film: man's truly original dream of a better life. This became most conspicuous in the case of Jozef Keselica, whose very personal "American Dream" is just one of his many lofty fantasies. The fact that he's making his own amateur videos was one of the great lucky chances we had, and his video diary became an important narrative plane of the film. He's the only one who made his way to America, which, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain, remained out of reach for most others from the region.

This is what fascinated me in particular: Micová is present on TV-screens worldwide due to the many films about it, and the Western world enters Miková via satellite TV, but it is a "global village" connected to the world only through the media. Helena Bošnoviová, who's still telling us in the film that all she gets to see of America are images on satellite TV, unfortunately and unexpectedly died just two months after shooting was finished, without ever having made it to the country of her famous cousin. Jozef again is notwithstanding it all dreaming his next big dream already.

In all likeliness only for the time being have we been the last in a long sequence of film crews in Miková. It is my heartfelt hope, however, to be spared the fate of one of my colleagues whose film was quite unfavorably received in Miková some years ago and who, on visiting the village, was thus threatened with a serious licking...