Sorry, this movie sucks

People are voting emotionally.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

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.

OK, people say this movie is disturbing. That might be because it is the only movie of this kind they have seen (so I think). I am already experienced with this genre of semi-reality no storytelling movies, as I call them. The reason I rated this movie just with two is because since the Cannes Film Festival exists we all have seen movies of this type. I mean a plain and more than simple direction that doesn't tell any story but showing us true life in some sort. I, in my opinion, disagree with directors of this kind of movies, like Hanneke sometimes, because they try to get the most out of reality without understanding that a real thing is a plain documentary without any comments. Just by putting a camera somewhere you are already implying your point of view. There for subjective and not objective. Anyway, as I am to experienced with this type of movies I can't understand why they keep having success. there's nothing in a movie like this. You do it once or twice OK. But tell me a story now and then. Don't just grab a whole team to film something that almost everybody can do. No credit from my side. I must say that bullshit movies like Die Hard 4.0 is almost better then this and I thought it was one of the worst movies ever.

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.

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.