Such a frustrating disappointment

Sorry, this movie sucks

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

By no means a happy film, it is nevertheless, so overwhelmingly well intentioned that it deserves some attention. Fortunately this fairly long (and some say slow) film is very much well worth sticking with. Frighteningly frank and 'in your face' at times, not least in the desperate sequences with the naked Ukrainian girls struggling to put their fingers where their Austrian paymasters are yelling for them to do. It no surprise that people with money will exploit those without but it seems an awful situation that the EU should allow a situation where it is more profitable for a Ukrainian nurse to travel to Austria and act as some house slave. There is not really any formal narrative flow here but we follow the aforementioned nurse going one way and a pair of Barely sane Austrians going the other way to try and sell bubble gum and gaming machines to a people that can obviously not need either. A mix of professional and no-professional actors ensure that this is gritty reality and I have managed to not even mention the incontinence pants in the Austrian geriatric ward. Illuminating, wretched and desperate but also somewhat heart-warming and vile. Good old Germans eh?

This is a statement which may apply to the two central characters in this movie, but it also fits audiences. This film here runs for almost 2.5 hours and is another work from director/writer Ulrich Seidl together with his wife. Back when this came out 8 years ago, he was among Austria's most known filmmakers and today he probably is even more, also thanks to his Paradise trilogy. One interesting thing about "Import/Export" is that most of the actors were absolutely new to the acting industry and same goes for the two central actors. Hofmann had a couple more performances afterward, but not a whole lot and for Rak this is still the only credit to this day. Maybe this is also why many of the characters and their dialogs seem so authentic as this is the only role they have ever prepared themselves for. Pretty good writing here and also excellent line delivery for the most part. I am not surprised this film got a nomination at Cannes.The story centers around an Austrian security employee who travels East and a Ukrainian nurse / cleaning lady who travels the exact different direction. At one point they meet and the story is connected. We watch their struggles, mostly professional, but also occasionally involving their privates lives. There is some Austrian dialect in this film, but you can understand it if you are a native German speaker. It is not that heavy. This film is basically about life going on. Most of the time it is very slow, but occasionally significant events happen. Seidl uses static camera frequently, so we feel as if we are in the room with the main characters watching them. There's some obscenity and nudity and, in one scene, a woman gets mistreated and pulled on her hair, just like a dog, so it's not always easy to watch and probably not a movie for feminists. But it's very raw and realistic and I do not have any major criticisms. A minor one would be that I do not like the main poster that much. It's a bit attention seeking with the top half and as the bottom half belongs to the female plot as well, I believe they should have split it into one for the guy, one for the girl. But this does not have to do directly with the film either, so I certainly recommend watching this.

This is Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's second non-documentary feature film after "Hundstage", but it is still very likely that an attentive audience can see where he is coming from. Seidl's style is a mixture of harsh realism and stylization carried to an extreme. It's hard for me to criticize his films on a good-bad-scale. I just can give an idea of what reactions "Import Export" triggered in me. Olga's way is characterized by constant exploitation in every one of her jobs. Only in the geriatrics home she has a stabile work environment (!), but ironically it's then, that she is supposed to leave the country again. Paul seems rather likable, but also with him you never want to connect too much (in the end you know why, maybe). Like Olga he is a loser of the system and not given the chance for improvement. Neither by his employers, nor by the people he owes money to, nor by his stepfather. Seidl is one of those Austrian filmmakers that actually are a role model for artistic intransigence.

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.