Exile (2020)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | exile |
| Country of production | Belgium , Germany , Kosovo |
| original language | German , Albanian |
| Publishing year | 2020 |
| length | 121 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Visar Morina |
| script | Visar Morina |
| production |
Maren Ade , Jonas Dornbach , Janine Jackowski |
| music | Benedict slate |
| camera | Matteo Cocco |
| cut |
Laura Lauzemis , Hansjörg Weißbrich , Visar Morina |
| occupation | |
| |
Exile is a feature film by Visar Morina from the year 2020 . The drama is about a pharmaceutical engineer from Kosovo who lives in Germany (played by Mišel Matičević ) who feels bullied and harassed by his work environment . The apparently well-integrated family man sees himself increasingly pushed out of the German community.
The European co-production with German participation celebrated its world premiere on January 27, 2020 at the Sundance Film Festival . In Germany, the film was presented for the first time on February 24, 2020 as part of the Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama section. A cinema release in Germany took place on August 20, 2020.
action
When pharmaceutical engineer Xhafer, who lives in Germany and comes from Kosovo, comes home from work, he finds a dead rat at his entrance gate. He suspects that it comes from the laboratory at his job, especially since he feels bullied in his job. He suspects his colleague Urs in particular to be responsible. First he has to find out that important emails have been sent to all other employees, but not to him. He does not receive documents and data that he requests, at the same time he is assumed to be incompetent when preparing an important synopsis. He releases the pressure when he regularly has quickies on the toilet with the Albanian cleaner .
His German wife, with whom he has two young daughters and a baby son and who is currently doing her PhD alongside her role as mother, does not believe that this is necessarily because his colleagues are xenophobic, but perhaps because they simply don't like him. Even when the stroller suddenly caught fire in front of her house, he felt discriminated against by the German police officers. Due to some misinterpreted incidents, Xhafer also creeps the feeling that his wife could cheat on him. In a delusional state, he almost strangles her in the marriage bed. She is concerned about her husband's increasingly paranoid behavior and has reached the limits of her resilience even with the double burden of children and the doctorate.
When Xhafer expresses the suspicion to his superior that he has something to do with the rats, which have already been deposited several times in his private life, he is outraged. When his boss thanks the whole team and especially Xhafer in a meeting for the good work of the last two years, he also addresses the different cultures and backgrounds of the employees who occasionally caused difficulties. Xhafer takes note of this impassively.
Manfred, one of the few colleagues with whom Xhafer had so far also maintained private contact, suddenly moves into another office. Xhafer finds rats in his mailbox that he dumps on his colleague Urs' desk. Urs, who at some point stopped talking to Xhafer and who had recently been threatened with a fork by him, commits suicide in the company by jumping out of the window and hanging himself. A short time later, his widow visits Xhafer at home. She tells him about the years of bullying that Urs endured at work and that it was Xhafer who replaced her husband when he started his job.
Xhafer loses his job. His wife leaves the common house and goes with the children to their mother.
Xhafer tracks down a boy who turned up in her garden one evening, and whom he knows as the son of the Albanian cleaner who helps his mother with the work in the pharmaceutical company. After finding out the address, he visits the family; the father is in a wheelchair after losing his legs. While walking he is pelted with a raw egg by his son in the stairwell. Afterwards, despite his reservations, Xhafer left for his mother-in-law's 70th birthday, from whom he never really felt accepted.
production
The film was produced by Accomplice Film and co-produced by Frakas Productions, Ikone Studio, WDR, Arte, VOO and BeTV. The script was funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media , and the film also received funding of 600,000 euros. He received the same amount from the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW . The Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg provided production funding of 200,000 euros, almost the same amount from Eurimages .
Visar Morina from Kosovo directed the film and also wrote the script. Born in Pristina in 1979, the director himself came to Germany as a teenager, spoke no German and had to fight for his position both at school and privately. In this regard, the basic conflict and emotional timbre of the film are autobiographical. According to the director, one of the most important impulses for exile was the New Year's Eve in Cologne, because in his eyes it marked a turning point in the way the public dealt with what is called migration: “From then on, paranoia took hold. Then later, in April 2016, I wanted to drive from Vienna to Cologne, but had to wait an hour at the border because the police were carrying out controls. ”Morina had thought this impossible months before, who was one of the biggest Achievements of Europe feels that one can move around unhindered, then suddenly a completely different face of Europe appeared. Before 2016, he walked through the city without thinking about being a foreigner. After New Year's Eve it was different.
The main role of Xhafer was cast by Mišel Matičević , whose family roots are in Croatia. Sandra Hüller plays his wife. Rainer Bock and Thomas Mraz can also be seen in other roles .
The shooting took place between the beginning of August and October 2018. The shooting took place on a total of 41 days in Cologne and the surrounding area. Matteo Cocco acted as cameraman . Commenting on his work, Guy Lodge in Variety notes that Cocco keeps Xhafer in the picture all the time, as if he wanted to reinforce his paranoia. In the office scenes, tracking shots through a seemingly limitless tangle of corridors distorted the viewer's feeling for Xhafer's reality. Regarding the work of the set designer Christian Goldbeck , Lodge remarks that, in support of this atmosphere, he kept the interior of the office in poisonous yellow and orange tones.
The film music was composed by Benedikt Schiefer . Xhafer's world of thought is repeatedly accompanied by pounding and pounding noises that end abruptly.
The film premiered on January 27, 2020 at the Sundance Film Festival . From February 24, 2020, the film was presented in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival . The theatrical release in Germany took place on August 20, 2020 in the distribution of Alamode .
reception
Reviews
The film has received pretty good reviews so far.
Screen International's Allan Hunter recognizes “identity” as a central theme of exile and compares director Visar Morina's film to a slow-burning Kafkaesque story in which a man's paranoia reflects wide-ranging social problems. The combination of the fascinating and the unsettling ensures that the film gets under your skin. The film should be particularly well received in countries that deal with questions of integration and acceptance of their migrant communities.
Michael Meyns from the Gilde deutscher Filmkunsttheater explains, almost like in one of the classic paranoia thrillers from the 1970s, Morina keeps the question open of what is reality and what is imagination, whether Xhafer is actually being bullied by someone in his company or outside or whether he is but is only a victim of his imagination. The answer to this question is ultimately irrelevant, because the feeling of not being part of German society despite everything is probably real for too many migrants. Meyns sums up: “Visar Morina shows an unpleasant truth in exile , holds up a mirror to the lie about the oh-so-liberal Germany, a society that likes to imagine that it is open, but whose prejudices against the indefinite alien come to the fore far too often . "
Guy Lodge writes in Variety that this character study cuts into the psyche of its protagonist with surgical finesse and triggers a subtle but dangerous balancing act when it painfully dramatizes the subtle xenophobia that Xhafer experiences on a daily basis. Without trivializing his political tensions, Lodge locates the ambiguity in exile in an area between Michael Haneke's studies of domestic terror and Ruben Östlund's wild comedies, about the insecurity of men. Mišel Matičević's remarkable achievement is that he expresses Xhafer's state of mind through the stoic expression, while this indifferent presence stands in stark contrast to Sandra Hüller's more expressive expression.
Even Roger Ebert critic Nick Allen describes exile as a kind of thriller, Michael Haneke would make. The film feels full, even if it's mostly about showing Xhafer's growing paranoia, only to then give him a bit of reality again when he thinks it's getting worse. Go from one carefully composed scene to the next to keep us in line with Xhafer's internal horror.
Keith Uhlich of The Hollywood Reporter writes that Exile explores the space between psychological extremes rather harrowing and often brilliantly, and Morina and cinematographer Mateo Cocco put the viewer fully into Xhafer's paranoid perspective by staying close to him in almost every scene. Matičević is sensational as the main actor and keeps his gruff facial expressions consistently stoic, which underlines the internalized terror of Xhafer. The scenes in the inconspicuous company are not far from the Curb Your Enthusiasm , and the last shot is incredibly funny in its indecision, a black-comic ellipse that summarizes a soul-destroying human condition, the end of which is not in sight.
Birgit Roschy writes in her review at epd Film that Xhafer's increasing tunnel vision finds its equivalent in labyrinthine office corridors and doors on which he knocks in vain and in a Kafkaesque atmosphere that continues into his home. As sovereign as this psychodrama is stylistically, some of the secondary characters seemed too striking, according to Roschy. Then again Morina succeeds in scenes that take your breath away with their density and accuracy, so in scenes in which Xhafer experiences such a brutal humiliation that you don't easily forget this scene.
Award
German Script Award 2018
- Awarded the Golden Lola ( Visar Morina )
- Award for best film with the Heart of Sarajevo (Visar Morina)
- Nomination in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition (Visar Morina)
Web links
- Exile in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Exile at crew united
- Exile in the program of the Sundance Film Festival (English)
- Exile in the program of the Berlin Film Festival
Individual evidence
- ^ Certificate of Release for Exile . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF; test number: 197698 / K).
- ↑ a b c d e Visar Morina's "Exile" in the international competition of the 25th Sundance Film Festival. In: filmstiftung.de, December 5, 2019.
- ↑ Exile / Exile. In: berlinale.de. Retrieved March 4, 2020.
- ^ A b Hannah Pilarczyk: "Exile" filmmaker about migrants in the cinema: "We keep asking ourselves where we belong". In: Der Spiegel, August 22, 2020.
- ↑ a b c exile. In: sundance.org. Retrieved December 15, 2019.
- ^ A b Guy Lodge: 'Exile': Sundance Review. In: Variety, February 15, 2020.
- ↑ 2020 Sundance Film Festival: 118 Feature Films Announced. In: sundance.org, December 4, 2019.
- ↑ Sundance Film Festival 2020: Program. In: sundance.org. Accessed December 21, 2019 (PDF; 1.1 MB)
- ↑ Panorama 2020: (Un) common Grounds. In: berlinale.de. Retrieved December 17, 2019.
- ↑ Jochen Müller: First films for Berlinale 2020. In: Blickpunkt: Film, December 17, 2019.
- ↑ Exile. In: alamodefilm.de. Retrieved March 16, 2020.
- ↑ Start dates Germany In: insidekino.com. Retrieved August 20, 2020.
- ↑ Exile (exile). In: Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved February 28, 2020.
- ↑ Allan Hunter: 'Exile': Sundance Review. In: screendaily.com, January 27, 2020.
- ↑ Michael Meyns: Exile. In: programmkino.de. Retrieved February 28, 2020.
- ↑ Nick Allen: Sundance 2020: Exile, Jumbo. In: rogerebert.com, January 29, 2020.
- ↑ Keith Uhlich: 'Exile': Film Review. In: The Hollywood Reporter, January 31, 2020.
- ↑ https://www.epd-film.de/filmkritiken/exil
- ↑ Christopher Vourlias: Visar Morina's 'Exile' Wins Top Prize at Sarajevo Film Festival. In: Variety, August 20, 2020.