ridiculous rating

Please don't spend money on this.

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

By no means a happy film, it is nevertheless, so overwhelmingly well intentioned that it deserves some attention. Fortunately this fairly long (and some say slow) film is very much well worth sticking with. Frighteningly frank and 'in your face' at times, not least in the desperate sequences with the naked Ukrainian girls struggling to put their fingers where their Austrian paymasters are yelling for them to do. It no surprise that people with money will exploit those without but it seems an awful situation that the EU should allow a situation where it is more profitable for a Ukrainian nurse to travel to Austria and act as some house slave. There is not really any formal narrative flow here but we follow the aforementioned nurse going one way and a pair of Barely sane Austrians going the other way to try and sell bubble gum and gaming machines to a people that can obviously not need either. A mix of professional and no-professional actors ensure that this is gritty reality and I have managed to not even mention the incontinence pants in the Austrian geriatric ward. Illuminating, wretched and desperate but also somewhat heart-warming and vile. Good old Germans eh?

Another bizarre entry from German director Ulrich Seidl, whose previous effort, Hundstage, made me question his sanity for producing it and, and mine for watching it. I gave him another shot with Import Export and I am still bewildered by Mr. Seidl. Olga, a Ukranian nurse who lives with her mother and child, struggles with money and turns to internet pornography for extra cash. She poses nude for a camera and takes requests from men calling in and paying for a sexual performance. She moves to Vienna to live and work for a wealthy family. She is fired for being suspected of theft and she then gets a job as a cleaner at a senior care hospital and falls for one of the patients, Erich, who promises to marry her, but diesAn Austrian man named Paul lives with his mother and stepfather and dog named Caesar, and practices martial arts. He works as a security guard, but gets fired after being handcuffed and stripped naked by a gang of Turks. His girlfriend leaves him and he travels with his stepfather, Michael, to the Ukraine to install video gambling machines. They stop in Slovakia and look for prostitutes in a Roma neighborhood. Again, Seidl ends the movie ambiguously. He is 0 for 2 in my opinion, and I will bypass any more of his work.

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'm not going to write much here. I am open to dark films (in fact I tend to prefer them). But this was one of the most depressing, frustrating films I have ever seen. Long, long, long cut scenes of depressing or morbid circumstances (such as people suffering in palliative care, very raw). The director establishes the mood and the dynamic between the characters and then stays on the scene, often with minimal dialogue for 4-5 minutes - agonizingly long. This film is not an exploration of existential depression -- this film IS existential depression. The one 'warm' scene in the film where Olga dances with the old man, felt to me like a brief smile before being sucked down a black hole - which is what this film felt like.The sole mandate seemed to be to show that life is sh*t and then you die - mission accomplished.