ZAHNMEKKA - The Mecca of Teeth

A very modern, luxurious coach keeps picking up the local farmers in the mountain region of Northern Switzerland. The bus keeps driving from one house to the other and collects the people one by one. Soon the bus is filled with farmers, so the driver turns the vehicle around and the group heads east, through Austria towards their final destination: the city of Győr in northwestern Hungary. This group of farmers are only one of many organized groups who visit Hungary’s best developed, richest regions and spend a pleasant holiday there, with Gulasch parties, baths and…once they are in Hungary, they get their annual dental care done too. This area framed by the triangle of Győr, Sopron and Mosonmagyaróvár, the 3 major cities around is often referred to as the Zahnmekka, the Mekka of Teeth, where people from the West can get their teeth fixed relatively cheap.

This film is focusing on the phenomenon of Dental Tourism that has become the trend of getting the teeth fixed in a cheap and pleasant way. Although dental care as an activity is usually not a very pleasant way of spending the holiday, this combination of mixing holiday with fixing teeth is a typical practical invention of the people living in the western civilizations of the early 21st century. While spending money on holiday, people are saving money on health care at the same time. The Northwestern area of Hungary has developed two industries in parallel in the past decade: tourism and dentistry. The people coming from Austria, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, the UK and the USA are visiting a place that has become a dental-touristic city, with more than fifty dentist`s surgeries. For the young generation of locals, becoming a tooth technician is the most trivial choice for a carrier, while  many freshly graduated dentists are lured into these cities to earn a lot more than those who must carry on fixing Hungarian teeth for Hungarian money.

Dierctor: Dániel Béres
Producer: Bojana Papp , Eszter Gyarfas