Import Export

Import: a Ukrainian nurse and single mother, Olga, has had enough of her WebCam-porn job, leaves her child with her mother and sets off for Austria to find a job as a cleaner in a nursing home. Export: Paul, an unemployed Viennese – unsuitable as a security guard – leaves with his father-in-law for the Ukraine to install video-game machines. Olga and Paul don’t meet each other, but that makes their lives mirror each other even more.
Import Export is again a controversial and very manipulated analysis of today’s Europe, with a super cool and extremely consistent aesthetic characteristic of Seidl. At the same time, human warmth, humour and gentleness seem more than ever present in the vicissitudes of two characters without opportunities, who do not just cross physical boundaries, but above all have to conquer an internal barrier to believe in themselves.
For his second feature, Ulrich Seidl spent about a year looking for the right actors. They had never been in front of a camera before. Their backgrounds do not differ greatly from those of the protagonists, but the plot in which the director puts them in is purely fictional. Yet we can feel the documentary authenticity there, because Seidl uses real locations as the arena for his merciless, hyper-realistic drama. Import Export combines dark comedy, groundbreaking humanism and confrontational and painful truth seeking.

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