Import Export: Human traffic

DIRECTED BY Ulrich Seidl, 2007

STARRING Ekateryna Rak (Olga), Paul Hoffman (Pauli), Michael Thomas (Michi)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong real sex and very strong language

RUN TIME 135 mins approx, Trinity

LANGUAGE German, Russian & Slovakian

COVER QUOTE 'Jaw-dropping… This extraordinary film makes everything else around look comfy and pedestrian' - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT An unsentimental drama contrasting economic prospects for central Europeans a generation after the end of the Cold War.

THE PLOT Olga, an underpaid children's nurse in the Ukraine, tries to supplement her wage in the online porn industry. Pauli, a Viennese security guard, loses his job after he's assaulted by a group of young men and has to turn to his step-father, Michi, for help finding work. Olga moves to Austria, where she goes through a series of jobs, including an unpleasant period as a nanny; when she finds work as a hospital cleaner, Olga is tormented by one of the nurses after she starts to befriend and care for some of the patients. Pauli ends up distributing gaming machines in the former Yugoslavia with Michi; Michi chats up women in front of his step-son and tries to have sex with a prostitute with Pauli watching. Pauli leaves in disgust; at first he tries to find a job at the local market, then he starts hitchhiking.

THE FILM There is no sex in Import Export, despite the blandishments of the certification, but other forms of sexual activity reduced to the status of financial transaction. The female protagonists of Import Export are made to display themselves for male clients, while responding to their every command.

Austrian Ulrich Seidl can afford to be unsentimental in Import Export; Olga gets the giggles when her friend Tatjana gives her a crib sheet of useful German phrases when working on the web. The framing of the scenes is reminiscent of Roy Andersson's You, the Living, which features some very funny sex scenes with a skinny, older man and a large woman, but there's none of that humour here.

Olga and her 'western' counterpart, Pauli, suffer contrasting humiliations: Olga has to put up with the barked instructions of a viewer she doesn't understand ('Nearer, finger, ass!' some of his single-word demands); Pauli is stripped near-naked by a gang in the basement car park of the shopping mall where he works (it is implied that his assaulters are not native Austrians). Later, a prostitute is led like a dog and forced to bark by Pauli's step-father with less ceremony than she's asked to have sex with both men.

In Austria, a woman undergoes a humiliating mock job interview, though she emerges triumphant, to the viewer's pleasure; Olga has to learn how to brush the teeth of stuffed dead animals for another job. She is afforded no personal space, as her compatriots are forced to expose their every orifice. Despite being bullied at the hospital where she finally finds cleaning work, she achieves some camaraderie with her colleagues; Pauli finds he is best off alone.

KEY SCENES Chapter 5, 18:30; 22:58 Olga visits her friend Tatjana, an internet sex worker. Olga watches women playing with themselves on camera at the beck of German-language subscribers.

Chapter 24, 1:49:20 Pauli walks into Michi's hotel room in Slovakia to find a semi-naked prostitute crouched on all fours on the floor. Michi is still fully dressed, including wearing his winter sports jacket. Pauli wants to borrow money from his step-father but Michi insists that they both have sex with the woman; finding no other way out of the situation, Pauli encourages Michi to have sex with her, which his step-father fails to do.

FURTHER VIEWING At around the same time as Import Export, Belgium's wonderful Dardenne brothers tackled the brutal trade of human trafficking from eastern Europe in The Silence of Lorna (2008) but both they and Ulrich Seidl were preempted by Lucas Moodysson. The Swede's Lilya 4-Ever (2002) is a pure-black depiction of the trade starring Oksana Akinsjina as Lilja, who says she is 16.

Lilja is deserted in an unnamed former Soviet Union country when her mother leaves for the United States with a new boyfriend. Lilja leaves school and is thrown out of her flat by an aunt, who relocates her to a dirty, decrepit apartment that's recently been vacated when its occupant, an old man, died. The flat is in the state he left it, she's told; her only friend is a boy, Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky), who plays basketball with any rubbish he can find and sniffs glue. 'I must get out of here,' Lilja says. 'Anything but this.'

When the electricity is cut off, and with her money running out, Lilja begins to dabble in prostitution, picking up clients at a club she was introduced to by a friend who wanted to make extra pocket money (Lilja's aunt tells her: 'Do what your mother did: go into town and spread your legs'). Lilja is shown some kindness by a young man, Andrei, who promises to take her to Sweden; she goes ahead, alone, is raped by Andrei's contact, and forced into prostitution.

Moodysson is circumspect in showing the sexual crimes inflicted on her (a series of men's faces at the same party shot from her point of view, for instance). Left behind, Volodya, kills himself; when Lilja intends to commit suicide, Volodya's spirit comes (wearing angels' wings) and beseeches Lilja not to do the same ('This life is the only one you've got,' he pleads) but she does so anyway.

At every point, when you think things can't get worse, Lilja's life plumbs further depths (her mother writes to social services from the United States, trying to revoke her guardianship, adding that her daughter was never wanted). The film is a tour de force, notable for stand-out performances from its two, young, leads.

KEY QUOTE 'I can hire you and fire you, that's how it is in this country' - One of Olga's Austrian employers

A Hole in My Heart: Blessed be the pornographers

DIRECTED BY Lucas Moodysson, 2004

STARRING Björn Almroth (Erik), Sanna Bråding (Tess), Thorsten Flinck (Rickard), Goran Marjanovic (Geko)

CERTIFICATION 18: Contains strong sex, sex references and surgical images

RUN TIME 93 mins approx, Metrodome

LANGUAGE Swedish

COVER QUOTE 'Moodysson's most radical and daring film to date' - The Guardian

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT Swedish director Moodysson delves into the world of homemade porn.

THE PLOT Teen Erik lives at home with his father, Rickard, who's making a porn film in the living room, with friend Geko and wannabe star Tess. Erik is a loner who stays in his room listening to industrial music on his headphones and keeps pet earthworms; the others encourage Tess to have sex with him, but slowly the two form a tentative friendship. The porn shoot becomes increasingly extreme as the three protagonists spend time in each other's company and drink more; after filming one particularly violent scene, Tess runs away. When she returns she brings some food with her; the dinner that follows descends into pandemonium, an atmosphere that's little helped when Geko later lets slip a secret from Rickard's childhood.

THE FILM From the despair Moodysson plumbs in Lilya 4-Ever (2002), you may be surprised to hear that the director offers some hope in A Hole in My Heart, especially as it features many graphic and disturbing scenes. The assault begins immediately with loud bursts of static noise and clips of organs, objects being inserted into various orifices and other close-ups (eyes and skin, often). It's a confusing montage whose contents gradually reveal themselves throughout the movie but, if you're going to stick with A Hole, you can't say you haven't been warned.

Broadly, Moodysson draws parallels here between the need for attention of amateur porn stars and Big Brother contestants; these are wounded people trying to live up to a sexualised image of the world they've bought into. Characters talk to camera and step into a wardrobe, as if to enter the famous BB diary room. Tess has been turned down for the TV show but is happy to do anything to appear in a porn film; she boasts of having had an operation to have her labia reduced, and many of the surgical clips show just that procedure. This was some time before the furore over Lars von Trier's Antichrist.

Latterly it becomes clear that some of the images we've seen, of plastic figures being pushed into a vagina or anus, feature a latex sex toy and not a real person. Action Man- and Barbie doll-type figures are used to illustrate some of the scenes, including sex between Tess, Rickard and Geko, though the real thing is shown as well. Tess is seen frantically trying to make herself come too, alone on the bathroom floor.

From the experimental, industrial music that son Erik listens to on his headphones, the soundtrack often jarringly switches to upbeat pop, as if the porn shoot were an MTV-style reality soap. (A noose hangs in the middle of Erik's room and on the window is a paper cross.) At one point the characters start playing football in the flat, an ironic take on the happy family scene at the end of Moodysson's Together (2000).

In an attempt to bond with his son, Rickard sets up a shooting target in the flat using a centrefold of a naked woman, her head replaced by the bull's eye; Rickard and Geko fire air rifles at the model's breasts and vagina until there is nothing left but black gaps. Dressed in a mask and motorcycle helmet the two men confront Tess for a scene in their porn film, until she escapes from the flat, taking her belongings with her.

Erik says that his earthworms will transform into butterflies; when Geko falls asleep in the scene of double penetration, he dreams of UFOs and corn circles. When Tess runs away, she collapses in a supermarket car park. Real-life is not enough for her: 'Everyone's so boring out there,' she complains, 'people are so ugly.' (Earlier on, she has read out a list of different types of cosmetic surgery to camera; idiosyncratically, there's also a discussion of the repercussions of education policy later.)

Famously, Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove was supposed to have a ended with a custard pie fight in the war room between the various heads of states; A Hole in My Heart climaxes with a particularly graphic food fight which, along with the revelation that Rickard suffered abuse as a child from his father, Erik's grandfather, provides catharsis. The characters break out of the confines of the flat and, for pretty much the first time, we see the sky. Tess and Erik play a morbid game where they try and fit themselves into laundrette drying machines, this time more like something from Jackass. There is finally laughter, though for many viewers it may come too late.

KEY SCENES Chapter 4, 23:01 Geko, Rickard and Tess take part in a threesome on Rickard's fold-out bed. The action is foregrounded by a demonstration using children's action figures. During the scene, bluntly titled 'DP' on the DVD, Geko dreams that he's fallen alseep; when he wakes up he discovers he was asleep, much to Tess's amusement and Rickard's anger.
Chapter 7, 41:04 Tess makes herself up and dresses for the filming of another scene; when the men come out their faces are masked and they're wielding a baseball bat. At first verbal threats are made and then the scene becomes increasingly dark; when Tess is physically threatened she gets up and leaves.
Chapter 10, 1:04:56 Food is sprayed around the flat and over the three characters involved in filming the porn film; snacks, and even washing up liquid, are stuffed and poured into Tess's mouth. Geko pees into a wine glass he says he will make her drink; he is then sick into her mouth.

FURTHER VIEWING Moodysson's earlier work is surprisingly heartwarming and may come as welcome relief following A Hole in My Heart and its extremely bleak predecessor, Lilya 4-Ever. Fucking Amal (released here as Show Me Love, 1998) is the story of a gay girl trying to get by at school; it's unromantic, but uplifting nonetheless, boasting tremendous central performances from Alexandra Dahlstrom and Rebecka Liljeberg. It's easy to remember Together for the climactic, snowy football kickabout which bonds the film's cast of disillusioned hippies, split families and wounded children.

After A Hole in My Heart, Moodysson continued his move from art-house cinema into film-making that is more appropriate for the art gallery with Container (2007). A woman and a fat man fool about onscreen in black and white. Don't bother.

KEY QUOTE 'You don't like women, that's the thing' - Erik

BONUS CURIO Moodysson claimed in an interview with the Guardian that a Swedish couple was caught having sex in a cinema in during a screening of A Hole in My Heart, which seems unlikely. He sounds heartened by the prospect.