Synopsis
Exil tells the story of a chemical engineer of foreign origin who feels discriminated and bullied at work, plunging him into an identity crisis.
Exile
2020 ‘Exil’ Directed by Visar Morina
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Exile is a nail-bitingly pensive and precise film. It follows Xhafer, a Kosovar man, living in Germany, married to a German woman with three young kids, and working for a German company as a scientist in a local lab. Despite appearances he is struggling to assimilate. He feels like he is being constantly judged as a foreigner. He thinks he is being deliberately undermined at work and that someone is racially harassing him by leaving dead rats in his letterbox. He feels besieged and this leads him to suspect his wife of having an affair with a young German man, just as he is bonking the Albanian cleaning lady at work, drawn together by their origins, despite their difference in…
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A crass, tiring, intoxicating force of nature that tears open the wounds of psychological violence and blurs the line between inner and outer states of conscience until the mind dissociates into complete isolation. Legitimately leaves you with a feeling of hurt.
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I haven't had such a feeling of dread since I last watched a Michael Haneke film - this is very much in the same wheelhouse, the unease creeping up slowly on the audience and expectations on where your sympathy lies being constantly upended. Added to the fact that nearly every character seems to be in a state of perspiration, as if in anticipation of the next terrible event. And it contains what will likely be the most withering put down in cinema this year delivered by Toni Erdmann's Sandra Hüller.
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Seventh film at Sundance. Very slow, lots of still shots, lots of blank stares. Very interesting and thought provoking though. Never would watch again but glad I saw it. Also Jarod and I caught the director outside and I asked him if there was any significance behind everyone in the film being so sweaty. His answer: “it’s hot.”
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Morina builds tension and sense of paranoia effortlessly by presenting us a hostile workplace in this German company where subtle racism is directed toward an Albanian man. Well, it's not exactly subtle but what makes this film so entrapping and disorienting is a real balancing act of the main character Xhafer's two sides: the victim and the attacker. He starts off passive but gets more and more infuriated by everyone around him at work and at home. It's clear there is something going on but Xhafer is the only person who notices it so we can't be sure what since we're strictly following his growingly unstable viewpoint (with fittingly "plain" color grading might I add). In the third act Xhafer…
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Bazı insanlar başlarına gelen kötü şeyleri tek bir kavramla kodlarlar. Bu kavram onların zayıf noktaları ve takıntılarıdır. "Bana bunu yapıyorsun çünkü ben şöyleyim". Sık karşılaşırız bu durumla, çevremizde çok var. Tıpkı Exil'ın ana karakteri Cafer gibi. Cafer, Kosova göçmeni orta yaşlı bir adam. Almanya'da yaşıyor. Bir ilaç mühendisi. Karısı Alman, üç tane de kızı var. Cafer bir gün evinin kapısına asılmış ölü bir fare buluyor. Bu bir kez oluyor, iki kez oluyor, katlanarak devam ediyor. Üstelik Cafer'in farelere karşı bir fobisi var. Başına tehditvari olaylar peş peşe geliyor. Cafer ise tüm bu olanların kendisine yapılan bir ırkçılık olduğunu, Kosova göçmeni olduğu için Alman iş arkadaşları tarafından dışlandığını, tehdit edildiğini düşünüyor. Biz insanlar dönüp hiç kendimize bir geniş çerçeveden bakmıyoruz. İşimize…
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Extremely tenseful and anxiety-filled horror realism that visualizes the way daily microagressions can fuck you up through both sight and sound.
Mišel Matičević is very great as Xhafer, an immigrant from Kosovo, working in Germany as a chemical engineer, who's being terrorized in the cruelest ways; or is he?
Director Visar Morina constantly plays with the small line between assumption and reality. We see life through Khafer's eyes and his interactions with the people he enounters. We see the small things: people not being able to get his name right, people never seeming to know which country he is from (even though he's mentioned it countless times, people misunderstanding him while he speaks (even though he speaks clearly) and him…
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An unnerving, mordantly funny character study of a man caught in a Kafkaesque double-bind; the more he tries to ingratiate himself with the world around him, the further he's exiled from its happy homogeneity. After ten years living in Germany, Kosovar immigrant Xhafer still feels the daily little slights of someone whose difference is always pointed out to him; his days in his clinically gloomy corporate office like an unending series of microaggressions and politely delivered humiliations (including one especially excruciating team-building meeting). But the more hostile the attacks against him become, the more hostile he gets in return; the film starting at the point where, after so many years of this cruel dialectic, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why…
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2020 Releases Ranked
TIFF 61 (online)
61st TIFF #11
As mentioned in the description, the plot is the following: a chemical engineer feeling discriminated against and bullied at work plunges into an identity crisis. I have to say that the perfomance of the main character (Xhafer) is decent. Throughout the film, the tension is get bigger and bigger and the anxious soundtrack (maybe something like strange percussion sounds) plays a big part to the creation of this tense. Also, throughout and after the film, i have many questions and i must think about it. Maybe, i'll add more to my review late. Or maybe not, who knows? -
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I was really intrigued going into this, as based on the review on the NZIFF site, it sounded like a treat. And in some parts it was, sustaining tension to an almost unfathomable degree that you feel you wish there was a pause button in the theatre so you could take a breather. These moments are masterfully created through uncomfortably close camera shots, the sweat drenching from characters giving this feeling of a kind of claustrophobia of being trapped. It’s very effective, and I liked it a lot.
But a lot of the film after about 45 mins to an hour in became quite repetitive, where it kept repeating the same ideas and things seen earlier. The tension becomes very…
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