Import Export (2007)

Import Export: Directed by Ulrich Seidl. With Ekateryna Rak, Lidiya Oleksandrivna Savka, Oksana Ivanivna Sklyarenko, Dmytro Andriyovich Gachkov. A nurse from Ukraine searches for a better life in the West, while an unemployed security guard from Austria heads East for the same reason.

“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.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe 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 worldu0026#39;s u0026#39;lower classesu0026#39; 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.”