Village X

Village X explores exactly these encounters. The format is based on the belief that many of today's social tensions are not just political, but cultural. A clash between progressive, mostly urban milieus and rural areas where people feel overwhelmed by the pace of change and left behind economically. These fault lines run across all of Europe – and they’re more visible today than ever.

In each episode, an outsider from the city, often with strong views and a bold personality, enters a village and challenges the status quo. A feminist comedian moves into a traditional Sicilian fishing village. A cycling activist lands in Weissach, home of Porsche and proud car culture. We’ve visited Germany’s coal-mining region of Lusatia, where structural change is hitting hard – and the historic apple farms of the Altes Land near Hamburg, where local growers fight to survive in a global market.

These stories all revolve around friction – and the possibility of dialogue. Both sides are forced to engage with one another, often for the first time. They talk, they disagree, they laugh, they reflect. Exactly the kind of honest exchange that is increasingly rare in a world of algorithmic bubbles.

As Tagesspiegel put it, “You watch people listening to one another – maybe even starting to understand.” Village X doesn’t offer easy solutions. But it offers something just as valuable: a starting point.

From the beginning, we’ve seen Village X as a European format. The dynamics we portray – conflict, change, connection – resonate from Brandenburg to Sicily.

Village X is a documentary experiment about difference and dialogue, identity and transformation – and about what it might take to start talking to each other again.