I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

hyped garbage

Admirable film.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I've seen this movie 4 times, and each one of them it gets better.The movie is just simple and great taken photographs connecting 2 stories that are actually disconnected but because of the fact that they travel in different directions.But it is the story of 2 people who are evolving, growing and also failing, fearing, etc. And those 2 people are the perfect pretext to know about other people who are mostly demons ruined because of society.If you are in the mood for one of the best stories told with minimum resources, but beautifully placed, used, and a profound message of humanity, this is the movie you are looking for.

Holy hell I have never had such a night. I recorded "Import/Export" on Film4, it was on there as part of the "Extreme Season" and thought that I'd give it a watch because it looked quite unsettling and I expected it to be slow-paced, yet gripping. It was none of those things. It wasn't even slow paced, it was beyond slow paced, I didn't even know a film could be this slow paced! I gave it a watch last night, and I understand that it was about 2hrs 30mins long but it felt like 4 and a half hours. I didn't actually read anything up about the film before viewing it, because I thought it was one of those films like "The Ordeal" where its better to let things unfold before knowing what's going to happen. Why the hell does this have an average rating of 7.0? I feel generous giving it 1!I don't often give films 1/10 because I can usually find something positive like the directing, or the effect it had on me. I even gave Lars Von Trier's "The Idiots" 2/10 on the account of it making me feel so uncomfortable and feeling disturbed that it's and experience I'll never forget. Similary "Import/Export" is an experience I'm not likely forget and not for the right reasons. I'll never forget it because I never knew that film could be this boring! Think of "Amelie" or "Mouln Rouge". Do you remember how full of energy and life they were? Well, "Import/Export" is the absolute polar-opposite of these films. Now, I'm not trying to say that it should be as full of life as those films because that clearly isn't what it's trying to go for here. But, what I am saying is it should just have a little bit of something that actually leads it on a path to somewhere.The film's biggest issue was that it didn't have a plot. So there are these two stories. One about a Ukrainian lady who goes around looking for a job, the system goes, finds one, loses it, finds one loses it and these jobs aren't exciting either, nothing happens that is significant in them at all. The second one is about a father and a step son going around looking for a job, this time with a twist (wait for it!!) they're looking for one IN the Ukraine! I know! I couldn't believe its interesting originality either! Oh, and guess what. Nothing happens. For the already long over-running time their is actually no content in the film. I believe the director's intentions was to show the truth about our human world and show how depraved we can be. Listen mate, I don't mind if you show me this, but at least present in a more exciting way. The two characters travel a road with pointless encounters that leads to nowhere and so does the film.The characters are completely unidentifiable, they're given little character and have little things to like about them. One's an immigrant who can't communicate the Austrian language and the other ones immigrants who can't speak the Ukrainian language. Hooray! Fun times. And who can forget the absolutely horrendous sexual imagery that served no purpose but to poison the viewers mind and probably to excite the perverted director. Some images were like porn. In fact it was porn really. The director said that he wanted these two scenes in to show the truth, that these things actually happen and people are too happy to brush it under the carpet. He said that he wanted to make them long so that it would have an impact. Yeah right, he's just a pervert! Listen here, Moon Unit, I know that the sex industry exists and I know about prostitution so you don't need to shove pointless pornographic images down my throat to understand that! If I wanted to watch porn, I'd go down to "WHSmiths" and look in the "Adult" section, but I don't want to watch porn! I want to watch a decent film! "Import/Export" is probably the worst film I've ever seen.I felt like I spent my whole life down in that sitting room and I seriously am struggling to think of a film I'd rather not watch than sit through this again! I can't understand why I didn't stop it? I've come close to stopping a film before ("Live Feed") but I've never actually done it. If I made it through "Import/Export" I think that I could probably watch anything with glee. So, weirdly I don't regret watching it, because now I can watch anything and see how so much better it is compared to this. The scenes with the geriatric patients were sometimes quite distressing and so the final scene was quite haunting for me. But, that doesn't change any of my views about this film. It's a plot less, characterless, scriptless mess that shouldn't be allowed to play on screens without giving a health warning first. I've heard people call films a 'snooze-fest' and I think that this is pretty much the definition on one.

I'm not sure if Austrian film maker Ulrich Seidl makes the best use of the extended study of duality between two seemingly random; seemingly disconnected European people plodding on through their lives as he might'v done, in this, his 2008 film Import/Export. As characters, his two leads are motivated and ultimately somewhat decent folk, particularly when placed up against those they spend the majority of their time with, but folk we feel are stuck in an inescapable world of sleaze; violence and discomfort. They travel their continent looking for incident and such in order to advance their existences, but are mostly always greeted with pain; frustration; antagonism and failure – happenings and the like which, whilst often carrying with them degrees of smut which we rightfully find uncomfortable, stick it in a break it off for good measure. The film is good value for its early part; Seidl's piece probably about thirty or so minutes too long, and where the equal balance between either strand felt in place for the first hour, such a parity vanishes by the time his heroine has reached that of a hospital and the whole things beds down into a near infuriating drama peppered with content we begin to question the need of.The film follows that of two people, one male and one female; one of whom is Paul (Hofmann), an athletic young Austrian living in an apartment whose spare room is rife with items such as boxing gloves; gym equipment and military webbing, and whose interest in such things extends to the fact he maintains a job in security at a local shopping mall demanding constant athleticism through its rigorous training regime. Olga (Rak), a young Ukrainian woman, works in her drab in-appearance; colourless; snowy homeland as a nurse in a hospital, but grows frustrated at her low wages which causes her to head west. This is in sync with around about the same time Paul decides to go in the opposite direction, specifically towards Slovakia, for various reasons linked to his failed relationship with a girlfriend and problems in owing money to some unscrupulous people.Principally, the film is about the apparent duality prominent between these two people; how, in spite of gender, nationality and differing backgrounds of living in the nations of Austria and Ukraine respectively, two people can wade through similar, if not identical, mires purely so as to reach similar denouements. Perhaps if they'd somehow bumped into each other in this wacky, mixed up world, they'd have been able to solve some of one another's problems and got along better in life. Their quests in either direction both begin with that of frank, sexualised encounters; encounters of which are humiliating and rely heavily on that of a distinct element of power instigated certain people within. Olga, with her low-pay frustrations, happens across an Internet peep-show job operating out of a lonely disused building, whose offices and such have been converted into small dens in which the girls in-front of the web cameras do whatever it is customers logged on at the other end tell them to. During a night shift at his mall job, Paul prowls the underground car park area and is apprehended by a group of youths; youths whom consequently strip him and instigate a demeaning session of mock-sadomasochism involving the man's security equipment that he had with him in the form of belt and handcuffs.In owing money to various people, Paul hulks out to the bleak-looking East of the continent with his stepfather on a job delivering beaten-up video arcade games and sweet machines. Olga's situation, again infused with that of money, sees her continue to earn very little when the peep-show job falls through out of an inability to understand the required languages online. We find ourselves leaning towards Paul's strand as things develop; Olga's bedding down into a hospital ward-set groove in which elderly men living their last weeks begin to find our Olga rather attractive seeing the whole thing descend into a series of sequences shot on static, tripod mounted cameras bringing more attention to the craft of the thing than is required, whilst more often than not reminding us of Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó's rather unpleasant 2005 film Johanna. Paul's begins to become imbued with a sense of antagonism, as he falls foul of some gypsies en route and then with his stepfather when attitudes in regards to women have them clash; the dragging of Paul into his stepfather's attitudes and lifestyle in regards to women eventually leading to awkward and ill-fated altercations forcing Paul into redistributing his priorities.There is a sense of frankness about proceedings, and I've little doubt Seidl makes the films he wants to make in spite of the cross-cultural settings and international teams behind the project; a sense of frankness evident in the film's title, a cold and inherently cutoff name balancing two opposites with little more than a cut-and-thrust 'slash' carving the two words and forcing them apart from one another. But we find it difficult to get as excited about the film as we would perhaps like; certainly, the film's sexualised content is disgraceful and constructed in an uneroitc fashion – a character's departure from proceedings as things step up a gear later on in a motel room echoes that of our own mind having already exited the scene. Additionally, cries of sexism on Seidl's behalf ought to fall on deaf ears as Paul is unwillingly dragged through a plethora of flimsy Eastern European girls; the man falling foul of his stepfather's hormonal urges around the same time as Olga herself gets caught off-guard by some of those leering aforementioned elderly men doing very little for the masculine cause in this respect. Therein lies the issue, the sense that these people are precisely the same, and yet light-years apart hammering us on the head again; the film is not without merit, but it is without an awful lot of much else.

Many film's about sad, boring lives are themselves boring (and not truly sad). Not so Ulrich Siedl's remarkable 'Import/Export', which tells a simple, and fundamentally depressing, story at great length, but with compelling naturalism. Not only that, but Siedl shows an uncanny ability to find interesting shots: the film has a haunting quality, and in every scene there's something that draws the viewer's attention and makes one think. The plot, such as it is, tells the story of two people, a Ukranian woman to emigrates to Austria in search of a better life, and an Austrian man who ends up in Ukraine; in Hollywood, their stories would inevitably be drawn together, but Siedl keeps them in parallel throughout. One link is that both are involved (at different ends) in the Ukranian sex industry, and Siedl's uncompromising depiction of this attracted some notoriety for this movie; but it's a long way from a titillating film.The acting is excellent, and the way the characters evolve is fascinating. Ekatarina Rak's Olga is allowed to inch slowly towards a better life in Austria, albeit at a high price. Paul Hofmann's Pauli is even more interesting, a loner and misfit denied the chance by his environment to become a good person; disaffected from his present life, he can find no route map to another one. Not only do the two stories not converge, but one ends with a lengthy series of hospital scenes in which the origin of the central character is of decreasing importance; this could be a film about lonely people anywhere. Indeed, for all the film's "naturalism", it's depiction of social reality might perhaps be questioned, I would have guessed this movie was set in 1997 rather than 10 years later (although my own estimate of reality is based on the newspapers, so it may well be this that is wrong). Certainly the film is not an explicit political indictment. But it is a sympathetic and original insight into existential loneliness and the harshness of life in the modern world.