Director	Ulrich Seidl
Length	141 mins
Certificate	18
Rating	Film making: 4  Personal enjoyment: 4

While politicians and businessmen agonise over the economic cost of the credit crunch, Ulrich Seidl’s film provides focus on the human cost of our present global economy. Its director may be Austrian but the film is very much an international project, both in its production and its address. Funded by Austrian, French and German money, Import/Export is set in Austria and the Ukraine, with sections taking place in a variety of Eastern European countries in between, and has dialogue spoken in German, Ukrainian, Russian, Slovakian, and even a few lines of English.

The story follows two characters: an underpaid nurse, Olga, is leaving behind her young child in a grim and cold Ukraine to work a variety of menial jobs in Austria, whilst an awkward, angry youth, Paul, travels through Eastern Europe in the opposite direction. Having been fired from his job as a security guard to pay off his debts, Paul helps his stepfather install fruit machines and vending machines deemed too old for Austria. Seidl does not deal in innocent ingénues. Even before she leaves the Ukraine, Olga has already worked in front of the web cam of a seedy porn site, providing sexual gratification for richer foreigners thousands of miles away. Paul meanwhile is not suffering under the ‘quirky’ rebellious alienation of an American Indie film. Though he suffers a humiliating misfortune in losing his job, he brings a good number of his troubles on himself, and also shows an overtly unpleasant side when he aggressively hassles strangers for money.

At the heart of both characters’ struggle is the desire to retain their humanity and resist becoming commodities. In the East this is undermined by lack of money. People are ruled by the need to survive and human interaction is often reduced to a business transaction. In the West the problem is the preoccupation with material things. Paul’s family are economically much better off than Olga’s, yet he lacks love and attention. His mother’s only interest in him is to tell him what present to buy for her birthday while his stepfather declares he has toted up Paul’s debt to him and wants repaying. Paul himself, it would seem, sees both them and his friends simply as a source of money. An even more disturbing aspect to this attitude becomes apparent in the home for the elderly where Olga works, a human scrapheap where men and women who are a burden to their families and society are dumped and left to die.

The film fits neatly alongside other recent social realist arthouse cinema like Lucas Moodyson’s Lilya 4 Ever (2002) and the work of the Dardenne brothers, and stands up to scrutiny in such company. Seidl’s documentary background is apparent in his direction: many of the shocking locations are real, and non-professional actors appear in a number of roles. It is shot on digital video, largely using natural light, with a fly-on-the wall style that implicates the viewer in the passive consumption of images of humiliation and neglect. Whilst the film owes much of its power to realistically rendered locations such as the vast Eastern European gypsy camp, or the home for the elderly and its inhabitants, the film also has a subtly expressionistic streak - found particularly in the de-saturated colours, moments of symbolism and uses of close up - which transforms these realities into striking hyperreal versions of themselves.

Some may baulk at Import/Export’s mix of explicit, seedy sex, dirty, urban landscapes, and morally ambiguous characters, but despite these aspects (and despite this review’s focus on the downbeat nature of the film), it still manages to give us moments of an unsentimental humanity and beauty that you are lucky to find in cinema of any kind. Thanks to the unremitting toughness of their surrounding context, these tender moments become all the more special, bold images and charged sequences that stay in the mind well after the film has ended.

Alternate Take to follow soon...