Gastarbeiter

Colour, 35 mm
Russia, 2009, 88 min
IP – International premiere
Section: East of the West - Films in Competition

Synopsis

An Uzbek town fallen on hard times. Everyone longs for jobs in Russia that are mediated by a local businessman named Karym. Aman, who used his services, hasn’t contacted his family in a long time. Disturbed by his grandson’s silence, Sadyk goes to see Karym, who sends the old war veteran to Moscow with a package for a certain man who will find Aman. He’s sure the customs officers won’t notice the old man. At night the police raid a boarding house for gastarbeiters. In return for a passport allowing her to travel to Romania, Moldavian prostitute Vika warned the police about a shipment of drugs. After being interrogated, Sadyk, a former defender of Moscow, is released and deported from Russia. But the worldly Vika, for a promised reward but also out of compassion, sets out with Sadyk in search of Aman. Their harrowing journey records not only the old man’s pure character and turbulent past, but also the brutal cooperation between greater and lesser mafias in the post-Soviet arena – a force demoralizing society through corruption and crime.

About the director

Yusup Razykov (b. 1947, Tashkent, Uzbekistan) graduated in screenwriting from Moscow’s VGIK film school in 1986. His feature debut Orator (Voiz, 1999 - KVIFF 2000), in which he pilloried the hypocrisy and eagerness of a naïve revolutionary, received the Russian Critics’ Prize. He treated the subject of polygyny, topical once again, in the pointedly critical film Women’s Kingdom (Zhenskoye tsarstvo, 2000). As director of the Tashkent studio of Uzbekfilm he shot the internationally successful Comrade Boykenzhayev (O’rtok Boykenzhayev, 2002 - KVIFF 2003), a dark work of the grotesque evoking the obtuseness, primitivism, and obsequiousness of Soviet era functionaries. In Gastarbeiter he turns a critical eye on the decay of contemporary social conditions under the influence of a widespread mafia presence.