# Import/Export (2007) Review: Europe's Bleak Crossroads > Import/Export is Ulrich Seidl's harsh, fascinating drama of two workers crossing Europe in opposite directions, compassionate and punishing in equal measure. Canonical: https://celluloidscore.com/reviews/import-export-2007-review/ Published: 2026-07-23 Last updated: 2026-09-24 Author: Kaiser Khan — Founder & Editor Language: English Review basis: direct-viewing Spoilers: none Rating: 3.5/5 ## Verdict Mostly yes, for viewers who can take unflinching art cinema. It is a powerful study of work and dignity, but deliberately uncomfortable and often cruel. ## Is Import/Export worth watching? **Yes, with a firm warning. Import/Export is a bold, bleakly observant drama about labour and humiliation on both sides of Europe's east-west divide, but Ulrich Seidl makes it as uncomfortable to watch as he possibly can.** The film's rigorous compositions and near-documentary performances produce moments of startling truth. The reservation is that its provocations sometimes tip from revealing exploitation into wallowing in it, and at 135 minutes the cumulative gloom is heavy. ## What is Import/Export about? [Import/Export](https://celluloidscore.com/movies/import-export-2007/) tells two parallel stories that move in opposite directions. In Ukraine, Olga (Ekateryna Rak), a nurse and single mother, cannot make ends meet on her wages. After trying other ways of earning money, she heads west to Austria in search of work, where the jobs on offer are cleaning, caring and serving in households and institutions that barely see her. In Vienna, meanwhile, Pauli (Paul Hofmann), a young unemployed man, is training as a security guard and failing to hold on to any kind of footing. Out of options, he agrees to travel east with his stepfather Michael (Michael Thomas), who is delivering and installing vending machines across Slovakia and Ukraine. Ulrich Seidl directs this Austrian production in German, Ukrainian and Russian, with a cast that mixes professional actors and non-professionals. It runs 135 minutes and competed at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. ## Seidl's frozen tableaux Seidl, who came to fiction from documentary and made Dog Days before this, has one of the most recognisable styles in European cinema. He frames people head-on in symmetrical, static compositions, often in institutional spaces: hospital corridors, stairwells, housing blocks, hotel rooms. The effect is both absurd and devastating, like a series of photographs of lives stuck in place. The method pays off most powerfully in Olga's story, particularly in the scenes set in a geriatric ward in Vienna. Seidl films the elderly patients with a frankness that is hard to watch but never mocking, and Olga's small acts of care become the film's moral centre. Her tenderness towards people society has forgotten is set against the indifference of the staff and the system around her, and those scenes are some of the most humane Seidl has made. ## Two performances without artifice Ekateryna Rak gives Olga a stoic dignity that makes her journey quietly heroic. She rarely states what she feels; instead, her face records every small humiliation and every compromise, and the film trusts her to carry long, wordless stretches. It is a performance that feels found rather than acted. Paul Hofmann's Pauli is harder to like, which is part of the point. He is passive, sullen and easily pushed around, and his relationship with his crude, bullying stepfather exposes a different kind of poverty: a Western masculinity that has run out of purpose. Michael Thomas plays the stepfather with an unnerving swagger, and their trip east turns into a portrait of how the powerless look for someone else to push down. ## Where provocation becomes punishment Seidl's films are designed to provoke, and Import/Export includes scenes of sexual degradation that many viewers will find gratuitous. The director's defenders argue that he is showing exploitation without softening it; his critics that he lingers too long and takes an almost clinical pleasure in the discomfort. Both views have merit. The Pauli strand, in particular, is weaker and more repetitive than Olga's, and the film's balance suffers for it. ## Who should watch Import/Export? This is for committed viewers of European art cinema, admirers of Seidl or Michael Haneke, and anyone interested in migration, labour and the economic divide within Europe after the expansion of the European Union. It is not for casual viewing. Content includes explicit sexual material, sexual humiliation, nudity, scenes of illness and old age, and harsh language. Set aside more than two hours and a strong constitution. For other German-language films about crossing Europe's divides: - [Toni Erdmann](https://celluloidscore.com/reviews/toni-erdmann-2016-review/), Maren Ade's comedy about a German consultant in Bucharest, far warmer but alert to the same economic imbalance. - [Good Bye, Lenin!](https://celluloidscore.com/reviews/good-bye-lenin-2003-review/), a bittersweet comedy about how the collapse of the East reshaped ordinary lives. ## The verdict Import/Export is a demanding, frequently brilliant and sometimes repellent film, with a precise visual style and a genuinely moving central performance from Ekateryna Rak. Seidl's appetite for humiliation will put many people off, but for viewers who can bear it, few films have captured the human cost of Europe's economic divide with such clarity. **Rating: 3.5/5** ## Related title - [Import/Export (2007)](https://celluloidscore.com/movies/import-export-2007/) ## Editorial - [Editorial standards](https://celluloidscore.com/about/editorial-policy/) - [Report a correction](https://celluloidscore.com/about/corrections/)