A select audience were spread around the seats of Cambridge Picturehouse’s smallest screen (3) often the place for odd ball films or those that attract a minority viewer. I have seen films here with only one other person in the theatre. On Friday night while you could have been out drinking or even watching the latest Coen brothers film, you could have been one of the audience watching Austrian Ulrich Seidl’s latest uncompromising, grim critique of Austrian culture and politics, Import Export. The narrative centres around Pauli, a macho young guy and failed security guard who travels with his unattractive step-father from Austria through Slovakia to Ukraine working for a slot machines company, and a Ukrainian nurse Olga who travels to an unwelcoming Austria to escape grim conditions in an always freezing Ukraine. Of the two, Olga is the more sympathetic. At a moving moment she makes a hurried illicit telephone call from her workplace to her mother and baby daughter and sings the daughter’s favourite song to her, all but breaking down. Pauli moves from being a rather unsympathetic tough waster to someone who develops dignity and resilience, particularly in contrast to his exploitative step father with whom he shares a white van and hotel room (on their trip east) and is forced uncomfortably to watch his degrading exploits with a Ukrainian prostitute. This was far more ‘acted’ and plot driven than the only other Seidl film I’ve seen Mit Verlust ist zu rechnen (1992)… aka Loss Is to Be Expected (International: English title). Actually although this is probably not his intention, he makes beautiful shots from the most inhospitable settings: the camera work, usually locked down – rather like his fellow countryman Michael Haneke, has a certain aesthetic. It is one of the reasons that the films are bearable. In spite of the grim things that surround both lead characters, and as the reviews say, there is a strong humanism in this film and we can’t help but feel that dignity wins out. Is the film a bit over-egged? Possibly. Seidl selects only the grimmest environments to film, then waits till it either rains or snows. The film ends with an elderly inmate of an old-people’s home repeating Tod, Tod (death death) as the film fades to black.