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IMPORT-EXPORT, by Ulrich Seidl

‘IMPORT-EXPORT’: SHOCKING AND POLEMICAL HUMAN RELATIONS

Ulrich Seidl is the greatest demolisher among Austrian filmmakers. In his country, according to his films, there are insensitive hypocrites, selfish people unable to see the illnesses of the world, legions of men with no feelings. The Sao Paulo IFF has always followed his provoking and deranging cinema, with his characters found in loneliness and intimacy. The 60th Cannes Festival presented his new IMPORT-EXPORT in competition.


IMPORT-EXPORT throws light on two very close worlds, in some frivolities almost the same, but with abysmal social differences. On one side, the world of Olga, a nurse and a single mother. She wants the best world for her little son. Olga lives in Ukraine and decides to try a better life in Austria. East and West are similar in the cold and grey weather of the winter. Ukraine is poor and Austria is wealthy. But not for everyone.


The second story is Paul’s, an Austrian young man with no luck in work. He owes money to friends and suspicious violent guys. Then his stepfather decides to take him to do a job in Ukraine. They export video poker machines. In none of the two universes there seem to remain any dignity or human respect. Olga is sensitive and affectionate. Her job with internet sex, with invisible clients ordering their desires long distance, lasts little. The following as a house maid, ends when the mistress finds out the children like her and can communicate to her.


In the next job, in a house for old people, she finds it better to hide all of her feelings.


On the opposite side of the story, the exporters are the villains. They can find the ones to be exploited in the most sordid misery. The sequence of the hiring of a Ukrainian girl in a night club and the sex scenes in a hotel room are among the most deranging of the whole 60th Cannes Festival.


Little by little Seidl turns his focus to Olga and Paul, in whom he concentrates the reactions and search of dignity in human relations. As written by the director in his manifest-like press book in Cannes, “both fight to believe in themselves, to figure a sense out of life. Neither can decide between East and West. Both travel to find a new world. IMPORT-EXPORT deals with sex and death, the living and the dead, winners and losers, power and abandonment.”


Among documentaries and fiction, Ulrich Seidl has a unique style. His shots are long, shocking, polemic and sometimes embarrassing for the truths he shows uncovered and without artifice. His films are always unforgettable. His first fiction feature DOG DAYS took the Grand Prix of the Jury in Venice 2001. Before that he had been building his cinema with films like JESUS, YOU KNOW, MODELS and ANIMAL LOVE. IMPORT-EXPORT walks in.

More information in :
www.festival-cannes.org

English version: Laura Rebessi