General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Import Export (Импорт-экспорт)

Import Export (Russian release title: Импорт-экспорт) is a 2007 drama film by the Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, co-written with Veronika Franz, that follows two unemployed young people traveling in opposite directions across Europe: Olga, a Ukrainian nurse who moves west to Austria, and Pauli, an unemployed Viennese who travels east to Ukraine with his stepfather.¹^•² The film was produced by Austria, France, and Germany, runs 135 minutes, and competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Ulrich Seidl; screenplay by Seidl and Veronika Franz¹
Premiere	In competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival; nominated for the Palme d'Or³^•⁴
Runtime and format	135 minutes; shot on Super 16 mm, blown up to 35 mm¹^•⁵
Budget	2.1 million euros⁶
Leads	Ekateryna Rak as Olga and Paul Hofmann as Pauli, both first-time actors¹^•⁷
Austrian release	9 November 2007; 24,266 admissions⁸
Awards	Best Film at Bangkok (2008) and the Diagonale prize for best artistic editing, feature film (2008)⁸

Spoilers

Plot and structure

The film is built as two mirrored stories that never intersect. The "import" story begins in Ukraine and leads to Austria: Olga, a nurse and single mother whose hospital pay cannot support her baby, leaves her child with her mother and travels west. In Austria she first works as a housekeeper, loses the job, and ends up as a cleaner in a geriatric hospital.²^•⁹ The "export" story runs the other way: Pauli, an unemployed young Viennese who is fired almost immediately from a job as a mall security guard, falls into debt and joins his stepfather on a trip to Ukraine to install used video gambling machines.²^•¹⁰

Seidl's own synopsis frames the two worlds as increasingly alike: "The East looks like the West, the West like the East."² The two protagonists never meet; the drama comes from juxtaposing their parallel states of mind as each searches for work, meaning, and a place in society.²^•¹¹ The title itself is an economic term for the transport and exchange of goods, which Seidl applied to people: in interviews he described the film as being about "people who become merchandise," human import and export between Eastern and Western Europe.¹²^•¹⁰

Production

Origins. Seidl had long wanted to shoot in Eastern Europe, a wish rooted in his documentary Mit Verlust ist zu rechnen (1992), set at the Czech border, and in scouting trips to Romania for an unrealized project about a legendary 19th-century criminal. The basic idea he formulated was simple: two unemployed young people looking for work and meaning in their lives, the woman going from East to West and the man from West to East.⁶ In preparation he spent about six months traveling through Ukraine, starting in Uzhhorod, crossing the Carpathians, and continuing through Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, and the Odesa region, in winter and summer alike.¹³

Casting and method. Seidl cast non-professional leads whose backgrounds resembled those of their characters: Ekateryna Rak and Paul Hofmann had never been in front of a camera before the film.⁷ For Olga he wanted an actress who had never been in the West and who would really arrive there for the first time during production.⁶ He insisted on authentic locations, above all a working geriatric ward at the Lainz hospital in Vienna, where he wanted to capture everything that happened while still directing a story with actors; the ward grew far larger in the finished film than in the screenplay, and he added minor characters played by Maria Hofstätter and Georg Friedrich as nurses.⁶

Shooting and money. Principal photography ran from February 2005 to January 2006, with locations in Vienna, Ukraine, Romania, and Slovakia.⁸^•¹⁴ The project stretched over roughly three years; cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler described shooting in Ukraine at −30 °C and in Austria "among the dying" as the limit of what can be endured.¹⁵ Seidl wanted a winter film, but heavy snow in Vienna during the Austrian shoot forced a summer pause until the next winter, and a shortfall in funding from one subsidizer delayed the start.¹⁶ The budget was 2.1 million euros, which Seidl called very small, and he said it was a minor miracle the production reached the end.⁶

A first as producer. Seidl and Veronika Franz founded Ulrich Seidl Film Produktion in 2003, and Import Export was the first feature the company produced; Seidl held both artistic and financial responsibility for the first time, with French outfit The Coproduction Office as partner.¹⁷^•⁶^•¹⁰ The film was shot on Super 16 mm by Ed Lachman and Wolfgang Thaler, with Lachman handling lighting and Thaler operating the camera.⁵^•⁶

Style and themes

Seidl's signature style of static, symmetrically framed tableaux and documentary techniques carried over into this fiction feature. Scholars Martin Brady and Helen Hughes, writing in the collection New Austrian Film, place the film within Seidl's "anthropology of migration," examining it in the context of Jean Rouch's cinéma-vérité and arguing that his hyper-stylization offers a distinctive way of looking at contemporary migration and at migrants themselves.¹⁸ Nikhil Sathe, a scholar at Ohio University, reads the film's opening, an older man trying to start an antique motorcycle in a snowy landscape with no geographical context, as a deliberate test of the viewer's preconceptions about East and West, and argues that the film critiques Western perceptions of Eastern Europe through its attention to the act of looking and of being watched.¹⁹

Seidl himself distinguished the film from his previous feature Dog Days (2001): where that film dealt with inner loneliness, Import Export points at society's blind spots, which he attributed to its settings in public spaces such as the geriatric ward, a Ukrainian hospital, a school for cleaning staff, the employment office, an open-air market, and the subway.⁶ A Russian critical essay in the journal Kinozapiski read the film as a critique of the globalization project, noting scenes such as security-guard trainees drilling on a wasteland as if in military preparation.²⁰

Reception

At Cannes the film competed for the Palme d'Or but went, in the words of the UK's Independent Cinema Office, "below the critical radar" at the time, with a critical reappraisal following later.³^•²¹ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 84% Tomatometer score from 32 reviews, with a critics' consensus calling it "a grim and disturbing vision from Ulrich Seidl"; the audience Popcornmeter stands at 76% from more than 1,000 ratings.³ The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called it "an unflinching, at times almost unbearably hard yet moral look at human exploitation."³

Commercial results were modest. In Austria the film sold 24,266 tickets after its 9 November 2007 release through FILMLADEN.⁸ In Russia and the CIS, where it opened on 1 May 2008 on two prints through the distributor Кино без границ, it earned 131,385 rubles, about $5,532.⁴ Japan saw a theatrical release only on 1 March 2014, distributed by Eurospace.⁹ The film later received a Blu-ray release from Trinity Home Entertainment in the United Kingdom in 2010.²²

Place in Seidl's career

Import Export was Seidl's second fiction feature after Dog Days, which had won the Special Jury Prize at Venice in 2001, and it confirmed the direction of his later work: he went on to produce the Paradise trilogy (2012–2013) through his own company.²³^•¹⁷ The film also had a long afterlife in his imagination. In a later interview Seidl recalled that the idea for his film Rimini was born 15 years earlier, while he was shooting Import Export in Ukraine, when he noticed the talent of the actor Michael Thomas and developed his character into Ricky Bravo.²⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2000s › Biographical and historical drama films 2000s › Released 2006 to 2009

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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