One of the most depressing, unsettling and bleakest movies I have seen in a long time, 135 minutes long Import/Export 2007, written/directed by Ulrich Seidl is gloomy, dark, and disturbing film. It feels like a documentary, and the winter landscapes in both parts of Europe, Eastern (Ukraine) and Western (Vienna, Austria) look and feel equally un- inviting and mean. Who would think that beautiful out of the fairy tale Vienna could be shot so un-appealing but I guess the nursing places for the ill and old patients are not the most cheerful places anywhere in the world, and they only add to the overall feeling of pessimism, degradation, lack of hope or anything uplifting in the existence of two main characters who never met because their lives moved in the parallel directions, and every character they come across. Ulrich Seidl excels in giving Import/Export feel of a documentary and in showing how advanced the humans are in corrupting and humiliating one another. I think this film takes a prize for the amount of the un- sexy, most unpleasant and longest X-rated scenes ever filmed. I guess if sex is not accompanied with love, desire or at least, lust, it is very boring and uncomfortable to watch and makes a viewer guilty for the degradation they are forced to watch and makes them want to stop or fast-forward these scenes as fast as possible. If that what Ulrich Seidle intentions were - he succeeded fully. Let me put it this way - Import/Export is a well-made move. It made me think of the serious matters - for instance, how high is the price of freedom to look for and to find a better life, to support yourself and your family, to be able to go to any country you chose and to succeed there. I did not see a single false note in any performance given mostly by the non- professionals. Import/Export achieves what it was set to do but I would never watch it again. I got the point(s) and I don't think that it is for multiple viewings.

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.

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.

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.