THIS JUST IN: Cinematographer Ed Lachman will introduce  the final screening: August 6, 9:15 pm!

Special thanks to Debbi Berlin & Elliot Koss (Palisades Tartan), and Martin Rauchbauer & Johanna Menne (Austrian Cultural Forum New York).
Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl’s latest feature film tells two stories that at first glance appear unrelated. One is an import story, beginning in the Ukraine and leading to Austria. The other is an export story, in which the trajectory is reversed.
The first concerns Olga, a young nurse and mother who, determined to leave the Ukraine, decides to go to Austria, where she eventually finds work as a cleaning lady in a geriatric hospital. The other story follows Paul, a young Austrian man who finds himself unemployed and in debt, until his stepfather takes him along to a job in the Ukraine installing video gambling machines.
Both of these characters are in search of work, a new beginning, an existence, life: Olga, from Eastern Europe, where unremitting poverty is the order of the day; Paul, from the West, where unemployment means not hunger, but a crisis of identity and a sense of uselessness. Both are struggling to believe in themselves, to find meaning; both travel to a new country, and thus into its depths. IMPORT EXPORT is a film about sex and death, living and dying, winners and losers, power and helplessness.

“No filmmaker has gone so far out on a limb to deliver us the hard news about the new Europe and its grubby economic realities. Forget all the puffed-up indie dabblers who fancy themselves as ‘guerilla’ filmmakers: Seidl, like it or not, is the real thing.” –THE INDEPENDENT

“[At a time] when hundreds of millions of people…have been questioning the morality of an economic system that bankrolls the rich in spite of their greed and incompetence, this profoundly moral X-ray of the social and financial frameworks that regulate our [world] takes on a very special resonance. … IMPORT EXPORT is a work of the utmost political importance. It is also, in its rigor and fearlessness, its sorrow and pitilessness, an outstanding artistic achievement.” –Sukhdev Sandhu, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH