A young man from Riga falls into a sinister situation to stay in Belgium in Juris Kursietis’s bleak social-realist film
Here is the second feature from Juris Kursietis, a Latvian film-maker working in a toughly questioning European social-realist style. Valentin Novopolskij plays Oleg, a young migrant worker from Riga working in a meat processing plant in Ghent, Belgium. A grisly accident means that he is danger of losing the job and getting deported, but poor, biddable Oleg falls under the sway of a sinister Polish gangmaster called Andrzej, who genially offers to get him a fake Polish passport and fix him up with cash-in-hand building work with all the other eastern European illegals . They are all living together, drinking and playing Fifa in a house that they are supposed to be remodelling – but the mercurial and voluble Andrzej is in fact terrorising them like an abusive stepfather and using them in violent crime.
Here is the second feature from Juris Kursietis, a Latvian film-maker working in a toughly questioning European social-realist style. Valentin Novopolskij plays Oleg, a young migrant worker from Riga working in a meat processing plant in Ghent, Belgium. A grisly accident means that he is danger of losing the job and getting deported, but poor, biddable Oleg falls under the sway of a sinister Polish gangmaster called Andrzej, who genially offers to get him a fake Polish passport and fix him up with cash-in-hand building work with all the other eastern European illegals . They are all living together, drinking and playing Fifa in a house that they are supposed to be remodelling – but the mercurial and voluble Andrzej is in fact terrorising them like an abusive stepfather and using them in violent crime.
- 3/23/2021
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
“If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere,” said Theresa May near the beginning of her ill-fated premiership of the United Kingdom. An ugly, insular attempt to shame migrants and multinationals across the European Union, the term “citizen of nowhere” has since been claimed with defiant pride by many of its targets — yet its very coinage remains chilling, according subhuman status to those who must cross borders to make a living, or just to hold onto their lives. By turns despairing, exhilarating and acridly funny, Latvian director Juris Kursietis’ tremendous “Oleg” peers closely at the real, ragged soul within one such nowhere man: a young, debt-ridden Latvian butcher scraping by in Ghent, whose desperation to stay put lands him at the mercy of the Polish immigrant mafia, which is to say not much mercy at all.
As an unblinking study of contemporary...
As an unblinking study of contemporary...
- 7/7/2019
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
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