Notícias

Anyone who’s ever scoffed at a company referring to its employees as family will immediately hear alarm bells ringing when Zhanna (Lyudmila Vasilyeva), the matriarch who runs Produkty 24, tells her workers they aren’t just employees, they’re her children. It won’t take long for “Convenience Store” to justify that skepticism and then some: A highlight of the 2022 Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama program, Michael Borodin’s look at an Uzbek immigrant working in the Moscow outskirts is all the more disturbing for the fact that it’s based on a real case of human trafficking.

The marriage of Mukkahabat (a gently devastating Zukhara Sanzysbay) to a fellow worker is our entree into this world, but it’s hardly a storybook wedding. Taking place in a backroom of Produkty 24, it feels more like a forced union than the beginning of happily ever after. Flickering lights and loud music...

Uzbekistan-born Michael Borodin makes a searing feature debut with the Russia-Turkey-Slovenia co-production “Convenience Store,” a story of modern slavery in Moscow, taking places under the noses of thousands of indifferent witnesses. Demonstrating his interest in pressing social issues, Borodin’s Berlinale Panorama selection was inspired by his personal experience as an illegal immigrant to Russia and the 2012 case of the “Golyanovo slaves,” which is now making its way to the European Court of Human Rights.

Developed through the Next Step program of Cannes’ Critics’ Week and other co-production markets, the film, like the case of the Golyanovo slaves, centers on citizens of the former Soviet Republics, who are illegal migrants to Moscow and forced to work long hours, unpaid, in 24/7 convenience shops, without being able to leave the premises. Their documents are taken away and they experience physical and sexual violence.

“I would be happy if the film had a...