GamerTab That was an excellent one.

AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

steve-tiller1 I saw this movie in London on a Friday night in October at a point when the world's finances were in meltdown and the FTSE had lost 9% of its value in one day. So what? So everything... This film couldn't have been more apposite; Import Export is all about capitalism - and cash. Having it. Not having it. And the humiliations most people must undergo just to stay afloat.And, as it turns out in this movie, the real heroes of the piece are the 'losers' West and East, but particularly the latter; losers who may have few chips to bet in capitalism's little crap game, but ones who haven't yet forgotten their humanity.In particular Olga, the Ukrainian nurse who travels to the West only to absorb one humiliation after another. In a series of beautiful scenes in the Geriatric hospital in Vienna where she now works as a cleaner - we see her variously comb the hair of a demented inmate before a nurse tell her it's against the rules, plug in a phone and sing a lullaby to her baby a thousand miles to the East, dance tenderly with a dying patient in a basement storeroom and later go to the 'Exitus' to make a last vigil over his body, a moment of almost religious intensity...Interwoven with her story, is that of Pauli who makes the journey in the opposite direction, ending up in the Ukraine with his debased and alcoholic step-father, a pathetic and impotent racist whose behaviour reminded me strongly of the SS invaders in the climactic scene of Elim Klimov's Come and See. A man whose debasement is a cypher for the moral emptiness of the West. For money, he gets a prostitute, naked from the waist down, to crawl round on her hands and knees while telling her to repeat, in German, a language she doesn't understand, that she's a 'stupid f**king c**t'.The power of money. The only thing he understands...Pauli finally tries to 'defect' to the East. But even there the system is now dog eat dog so he leaves his step-father and begins to hitch-hike back. Meanwhile, at the hospital, the cleaners, ladies from the East all, sit in their overalls around a dinner table and share a joke. And laugh and laugh and laugh.Their spirit is not dead. It's the real power of the downtrodden. Everywhere.

film_riot 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.

likedeeler I had not heard of the director before I saw the film last night in our small cinema around the corner. My personal favourite in 2007 so far.Most, if not all, actors are nonprofessionals, delivering spotless performances. This adds to the film's impact and slice-of-life feel while being contrasted by deliberately artificial camera views. There are two story lines that cross but never merge: Olga, a nurse in a grey Ukrainian city, wants to find something better than her clinic work that just does not pay. She lives in a shabby flat with her mother and leaves behind her little child to go to Vienna, after a short intermezzo in the webcam porn business. In Austria, Olga gets hired as a charlady in well-off people's houses before she ends up working in a geriatric hospital, putting away shitty nappies.Paul, from Vienna, lives with his mother, too. He starts a job as security guard in a car park and loses it again after a bunch of youngsters get at him in the basement at night, strip and humiliate him. Paul is broke and constantly has to evade his shady creditors. He stupidly provokes losing also his girlfriend and eventually goes to the Ukraine with his mother's sleazy boyfriend to set up bubble gum machines.The sparse plot is depicted in and around a series of still lifes through which the characters move. The camera changes between hand-held motion and those long, static, almost photographic images. Their often symmetric composition conveys beauty and drabness at the same time. Some scenes are unbelievably hard, others very comical, many are both. Sex, death, hope, humiliation, agony, compassion, the ugly face of capitalism and the grimaces of poverty. Separate rags for loo and bathroom armatures. Absurdity. Futility. It's all there, except deliverance. Breathtaking.

writers_reign This is a new entry from Ulrich Seidl, the man who inflicted Dog Days on an unsuspecting public a couple of years ago. Nothing changes much in Seidl's world, life's a bitch/dog and then you die. This time around he centres on two no-hopers who never meet which may be just as well. Olga is a trained nurse but in the Ukraine that doesn't buy her even a half-decent lifestyle so she moonlights - Seidl would probably argue she is forced to - as a porn model until deciding to leave both the Ukraine and her infant daughter for Vienna where, natch, she doesn't do much better. Vienna is home to Pauli who is also unable to sustain much of a life most of which is spent avoiding the heavy hitters he owes money to. Eventually he teams up with his stepfather to deliver/peddle sundry items from a van and winds up in the Ukraine.If you know what Seidl's message is let me know and I'll try to give a damn.