Import Export

No matter what you think about a film like Import/Export, you have to have some kind of reaction to it. It is an unsettling, bleak look at a couple of lives that the viewer will rarely think about unless confronted with in a film like this. The story takes place in both Ukraine and in Austria and focuses on 2 lives of very different people who share a similar circumstance of being at the end of the line in the place that they live in. Both seek change and their circumstances take very different shapes and fates but share a similar intention, to find a better life.

The director and writer give us little hope in their depiction of these 2 lives and how their environments constantly conspire to either keep them down or challenge their will to survive and change. It is a story at once about Eastern Europe and a story about the world's 'lower classes' and their monumental struggle against inertia and their past. It is a movie filled with images, humor, highs and lows, and, graphic scenes of sexual play that all add to the base quality of the human experience that exists not only in Eastern Europe, but, many place in the world today. Human beings have created incredible technology and yet there is still so much ignorance, cruelty, and, general meanness in the world. A rough film told with a keen eye toward a subtle message.

I was not prepared for this film. I feel I have little to add that other reviewers have not already written. Just a few observations. Two young people needing money leave their countries: one, a woman from the former Soviet Union, the second a man from the West. Their two journeys melt into one although they never meet. Through their eyes we see the full horror of life around them. Pivotal scenes are the young man's experience of a wasted concrete landscape unfit for habitation, but is full of those enduring dire deprivation, and for the young woman her employment in a rich country which utterly degrades the poor. East and West is portrayed as being a hell on earth with death as the final escape. There is no music on the soundtrack except for what is used by those in their specific scenes. No manipulation used at all. The vision of the world we all live in ( the rich of course artificially protecting themselves ) is worthy of Samuel Beckett. Endgame totally. I believe the film to be a masterpiece - again that overused word, but I unreservedly use it. It is expertly filmed and directed with a fierce force seldom seen in film. The one thing that I object to is the poster image which seems to me a deliberate come on for the prurient. Sex and violence is in the pitiful lives portrayed but it pales before the real content of the film. which is the sadistic way humanity drains all hope out of the poor and vulnerable. Many people watching this should feel utter horror and perhaps some will examine their own consciences. Be prepared. For many years I was put off by the poster. 2007 is a while back. Life has not changed, but utterly changed by Covid-19. Hell on earth has taken a further step down. It is the most terrible thought of all!!!

I came to this film when it was mentioned by a fellow IMDb user who occasionally points me towards some European films that I have not seen. More often than not they are fairly bleak affairs but, while Hollywood probably dominates the action genre, Europe tends to be best at films dealing with the bleakness of life. And so it is here in a film that painstakingly depicts the bleakness of the lives of two characters. Olga is a nurse in the Ukraine who travels to the West for a better life and finds herself working in an old people's home as a cleaner. Meanwhile Pauli is a young man in Austria who has little going for him employment-wise and finds himself under the wing of his morally defunct step-father.

It is not a theme that I haven't seen before but here it seems to be the entire film and there is surprisingly little in the way of narrative framework, far less actual narrative flow to it. In itself this maybe isn't a problem because "experience" films can work as well as "start/middle/end" stories – but to go for in excess of two hours without much of a story is a tall order and it is one that this film cannot fill. Without much of a story or characters what results is essentially a wallow in some specific examples of life as survival until death and very little else. This message is perhaps fair enough but it is delivered without much intelligence and comment, just scene after scene laid out. It doesn't even really have any sort of central scenes or direction to it and indeed doesn't even have any "big" moments that one could see as having been built to – although I'm not saying it would have been better by artificially having them.

The cinema vérité style is to be commended because it does convince as a piece of realism (which is why perhaps not having one big "event" is a good thing) but the downside of it is that, like life sometimes, it is pretty dull and doesn't really have much meaning behind it. And this is what I took away from the film because I did find it to be far too long for the loose material to sustain and it did feel like each and every scene had only the same message to deliver and it just kept repeating that long after the audience had gotten it. I guess if you're looking for a film to confirm the drabness of existence then this is it but it must be said that there are films that do it with a lot more meaning and heart than this one.

A fascinating study of the lives of two individuals, heading in opposite directions. one a poor Ukrainian nurse, who seeks a better life in Austria (so she can support her family), only to end up in the most horrid jobs and a young (under-class) Austrian man, who with his seedy step-father goes to sell gum-ball machines in the Ukraine. This is more than just a snap-shot of 'East meets West', being a complex life study, within the social boundaries and desolate landscapes. Set chiefly in Eastern Ukraine and a ghastly geriatric hospital in Austria. Some might find the pace painfully slow but deep down (and in the bleakest part of the planet), the two characters completely seduced this reviewer.

Many film's about sad, boring lives are themselves boring (and not truly sad). Not so Ulrich Siedl's remarkable 'Import/Export', which tells a simple, and fundamentally depressing, story at great length, but with compelling naturalism. Not only that, but Siedl shows an uncanny ability to find interesting shots: the film has a haunting quality, and in every scene there's something that draws the viewer's attention and makes one think. The plot, such as it is, tells the story of two people, a Ukranian woman to emigrates to Austria in search of a better life, and an Austrian man who ends up in Ukraine; in Hollywood, their stories would inevitably be drawn together, but Siedl keeps them in parallel throughout. One link is that both are involved (at different ends) in the Ukranian sex industry, and Siedl's uncompromising depiction of this attracted some notoriety for this movie; but it's a long way from a titillating film.

The acting is excellent, and the way the characters evolve is fascinating. Ekatarina Rak's Olga is allowed to inch slowly towards a better life in Austria, albeit at a high price. Paul Hofmann's Pauli is even more interesting, a loner and misfit denied the chance by his environment to become a good person; disaffected from his present life, he can find no route map to another one. Not only do the two stories not converge, but one ends with a lengthy series of hospital scenes in which the origin of the central character is of decreasing importance; this could be a film about lonely people anywhere. Indeed, for all the film's "naturalism", it's depiction of social reality might perhaps be questioned, I would have guessed this movie was set in 1997 rather than 10 years later (although my own estimate of reality is based on the newspapers, so it may well be this that is wrong). Certainly the film is not an explicit political indictment. But it is a sympathetic and original insight into existential loneliness and the harshness of life in the modern world.