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30 out of 34 people found the following review useful:
A Film That Should Elicit A Response From The Viewer, 2 November 2007
7/10
Author: scandojazzbuff from Thailand

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.

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23 out of 27 people found the following review useful:
Death and Money, 11 October 2008
9/10
Author: steve-tiller1 from United Kingdom

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

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.

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19 out of 20 people found the following review useful:
A cold,bleak and pitiless film!, 16 December 2007
8/10
Author: herjoch from Germany

Whereas Ulrich Seidl in "Hundstage", his first non-documentary film took the hottest days of the year for the description of apathy, brutality and humiliation in society, his new film takes place in a cold scenery. And that in a double sense: While in the East (mostly in the Ukraine) there is a deep winterly climate, in the West (Vienna) the relations and the social environment are characterized by coldness.Seidl's films have always been controversial because of the docu-like unrelenting gaze of their pictures,which abstain from any commentary and because of their description of social milieus and phenomenons one usually does not perceive or doesn't want to.All that applies also to "Import Export".Here we find scenes of grotesque disgust, in which the spectator is ashamed of watching and blaming the camera for its rigidity.On the other hand these films create some kind of maelstrom,which is difficult to escape from.There always is the question:Does he exploits his protagonists or not.Well, everyone has to find his own answer: I don't think so because showing the situation does not mean its denunciation.The story depicts in two unrelated strands two diametrical movements: From East to West and vice versa.The title already refers to the films main subject:The goods-like character,which the globalized capitalistic world imposes on the people.The society is in a desperate state ; nevertheless it is Seidl's most human film.He seems to show empathy for his two protagonists and even if there is no sort of Happy-End - the film has no real end at all,but just leaves its figures alone- the hope remains,that they have got a little bit of strength and decisiveness,which could make a more self-defined life in the future possible.Or maybe not.Every Film of Seidl makes you leave the cinema thinking,that the whole world and the people are in a desperate and hopeless state,but here we have at least little moments of tenderness,in which we see people fighting for their dignity.A rigorous film for the lovers of contemporary austrian film(Albert, Glawogger,Haneke) and definitely no "entertainement".

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14 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
A great, disturbing film!, 12 July 2007
9/10
Author: slabihoud (slabihoud@vienna.at) from Vienna, Austria

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Import/Export is not a film one recommends easily. It is a great film but it is not one to look at casually. The director Ulrich Seidl already has a reputation for drastic dialog and acting in his films. He started with documentaries and this is always apparent in his consequent films. The atmosphere is often unbearably realistic, many of his actors deliver so convincing performances that one thinks they must have been brought in from the street. They are not though. This, combined with simple framing leads to the strong documentary impression.

In this film the focus is on two story lines which move in opposite directions. On starts in the Ukrainia and moves to Vienna, Austria and the other starts in Vienna and ends in Ukrainia. Both show a harsh life with violence and humiliation and sexual exploitation. While viewing this film I often wanted to look away or close my eyes as to protect my soul from the terrible experiences, the two protagonists are facing in very different ways. The moments of violence, humiliation and sexuality, although shorter then in his earlier films, are shown in a very graphic way, and stay in your mind long after the picture is over. Maybe you will never forget them.

In this, the film has some parallels to Lukas Moodysons "Lilja 4-ever" which also makes you forget that it is a work of fiction you are watching. Moodyson concentrates himself completely on the tragic story of the main character's exploitation through the economic system and the resulting criminality in eastern Europe, plus the demand for sex without love in the western world and it"s tragic consequences for your unprotected girls.

Seidl, on the other hand, chooses a young but grown up woman and mother in Ukrainia, a trained nurse, who can't make a living by working in a hospital and is forced to work as a porn model in from of an internet camera. Then she leaves for Vienna to work there in various unpleasant jobs.

In the second storyline Seidl shows a young man from Vienna, trying unsuccessful to hold a job and always on the run from people he borrowed money from. He joins his stepfather on his trip through eastern Europe, delivering game automates and the like. They are both frustrated by their poor outlook of their future, and although they don't like each other, they both concur in spending their money easily on booze and women which they like to intimidate and humiliate.

The film has some rare comic moments, but often scenes open on a funny note but then change fast into something that makes you choke on your own laughter. All in all a great, disturbing film!

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7 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
21st century's nonmagical surrealism is on, 3 November 2007
10/10
Author: likedeeler from Berlin, Germany

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

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.

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4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Life without home, 20 October 2009
9/10
Author: paul2001sw-1 (paul2001sw@yahoo.co.uk) from Saffron Walden, UK

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.

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5 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
In our times – personal struggles on both sides of the border, 8 November 2007
9/10
Author: arkid77 from London, England

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

There have been many films in recent years, particularly European ones themed around what has become clearly one of the most important humanitarian and social issues to haunt the new century; immigration. Naturally a huge complex subject and many films have already touched some of the basic points as to why certain peoples have in the first place emigrated and then the problems they faced in their new world; often very serious ones being horrifically exploited in the hands of others.

Still, I think it would be wrong to conclude that Ulrich Seidl's challenging film is a discourse purely on this. While it does genuinely highlight many vital questions about immigration that I'm sure many people would rather not think about (let alone willingly watch when they go for some light relief in a cinema!), I think that the main purpose of the film is to try to make us understand the actions of to two very different young people, Olga and Pauli, The two characters we spend the entire film following while at the same time provoking us to question our own expectations and assumptions about them and others.

It just so happens that these characters both want to escape their very upsetting realities and even more worrisome futures. Both do this by leaving their home lands. Olga leaves Ukraine for Austria, and Pauli goes in the opposite direction.

Both characters never interact with each other or cross each others paths – thank goodness, it would be a very worn cliché if they had. Instead we are left at the end of this provoking film with many unanswered questions about the actions we have witnessed, what drives them and where are they going.

The film is incredibly refreshing for its lack of clichés I felt. At many points Seidl sets up our expectations using quite classical narrative techniques and in almost every case, what we think is about to occur doesn't. The paths both take are incredibly believable, helped enormously by the use of non actors throughout the entire film. It's really hard to forget your watching something that has been constructed when it features so many unnerving scenes of real people that are clearly not acting, just "playing" themselves. Both characters, especially Pauli is quite different from the 1st impressions we are given and its incredibly refreshing and sometimes relieving that our worst fears or own clichés about who these people may be are proved to be wrong.

The only obvious cliché I found was Pauli's disgusting step father Michael. I felt this made an important point in itself, to counter the often very negative news stories people in many western 1st world countries are fed about immigrants. In this film, a film by a developed 1st world European nation, the most unsympathetic low character is from said 1st world country - the land of the film maker himself! - the characters actions while he is aware are an important turning of the tables, reminding us as to how "we" may be seen or act when abroad.

Although this is left completely open at the rolling credits there is a very subtle positivism that the very compassionate direction and writing leaves us with I found. While anything could happen after the last shot, it seems clear that both now have at least faith; a life to believe in, one worth struggling for.

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5 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Too long for the substance to sustain and too simplistic in its message, characters and narrative, 12 April 2009
Author: bob the moo from Birmingham, UK

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.

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Import Export, 6 November 2007
8/10
Author: anton_hartl from Ried im Innkreis, Austria

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

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.

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2 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
Cold Dogs, 14 October 2007
5/10
Author: writers_reign from London, England

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

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.

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