A documentary essay about emptiness in Europe, exploring its causes, life in the emptying places, and attempts to overcome it in five landscapes: Latvia, Romania, Italy, Germany, and the UK.

"Emptiness" is a documentary exploring how and why certain places in Europe are losing people, schools, services, and infrastructure – that is, how they are being emptied as a result of the spatial changes associated with global capitalism, and how the remaining people are living this emptying environment and trying to overcome it. The film unfolds in a poetic yet gripping manner, quickly introducing and following compelling people and their stories. Most importantly, it shows how these protagonists experience and live in this emptiness.

Emptiness occurs when towns and villages gradually lose their constitutive elements: people, infrastructure, services, social networks, and the future. Emptiness is not only visible, but also felt. It sounds like the door of an abandoned house squeaking in the wind, it smells like a damp basement, and it causes discomfort and anxiety.

The message of the film is: emptiness, like global metropolises, is constitutive of and a challenge to today's Europe.
Emptiness is not a term imposed from the outside. It is a concept used by the people who live it to make sense of the new reality. And in the course of the film we will often hear the locals refer to their hometowns as empty, abandoned, hopeless. It marks the retreat of the 20th century developmental state and the onset of radical uncertainty about what is to come instead.

This film tells the story of emptiness and what fills that void in six different countries in six very different locations – Kuprava in Latvia, Rachis in Romania, Welzow in Germany, Itala in Italy and Blackpool in United Kingdom and an area referred to as 'España Vaciada' (Emptied Spain) in Spain. The film will be shot in these economically, culturally and socially distinctive landscapes in Europe to show that contemporary emptiness, even if different in each place, it is the result of global processes rather than the failure of one location or government. The message of the film is: emptiness, like global metropolises, is constitutive of and a challenge to today's Europe.

The contemporary depopulation of villages and towns we witness today, does not resemble urbanisation of the 20th century. Emptiness is a new spatial coordinate in the landscape of modern capitalism, where the kind of production that requires space and labour is no longer predominant. Consequently, some places and people are simply left behind. Residents must either relocate, reinvent themselves as value-producing individuals, or become self-sufficient and disconnect from the world.

People point to empty houses and apartments, and they list friends and relatives who have left. They fear school closures and the cancellation of transportation routes. They imagine the future as an entirely different world, one in which they will play no part.

The film tries to find an answer to the question: is emptiness temporary or is it a permanent spatial coordinate in Europe’s present and future? Will future Europe consist of thriving megapolises and from left-over places with left-over people?