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. Andrzej is played by Dawid Ogrodnik, whom I last saw as the sax-playing hitchhiker in Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida.
This is a bleakly uncompromising film, shot in a handheld manner, the camera shakily following Oleg closely around in the streets, the building sites and the various chaotic and squalid interiors. But it’s leavened with a kind of black comedy: Oleg ends up having sex with a young woman during a somewhat unlikely interlude, by conning his way into a private party and pretending to be an
Actor, and the realism is interspersed with dream-like and religiose sequences.