Exile is a nail-bitingly pensive and precise film. It follows Xhafer, an Albanian 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 origin, despite their difference in…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

78/100

Racism, as most widely understood does not necessarily have to do only with skin color, it actually exists in multiple forms, not just the directly aggressive one. What underlies all racism is the belief that a stranger/newcomer must learn and accept the rules of the majority, or at least change 𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗂r identity in accordance with the expectations of the majority.

How racist our society is has been discussed more intensively for several years. Cinema is not indifferent to it, many films in past have depicted the deeply rooted systematic racism and separatism in the past but the strength of Exile is that its not interested in simply blaming. The boundaries between misunderstandings and willful misinterpretations on the one hand…

В этом году Косово попытается в седьмой раз в своей истории получить первую номинацию на «Оскар» в категории «лучший фильм на иностранном языке», и как минимум попасть в лонг-лист у отобранного для этих целей «Изгнания» есть все шансы. Это вторая картина Висара Морина (его дебют также был отобран национальным комитетом в качестве кандидата от Косово, но безрезультатно), которая уже заручилась поддержкой «Сандэнса», Берлинале и ряда других престижных фестивалей, включая таллинские «Тёмные ночи». Работа на самом деле очень любопытная и достойная.

Джафер – родом из Косово, но себя считает вполне успешно ассимилировавшимся немцем. У него нет ни акцента, ни каких-то внешних особенностей, указывающих на его иное происхождение. Он уже долгое время работает в большой фармакологической компании, женат и воспитывает дочь. Всё…

ich leg mich hin

sweat isn't exactly the kinda thing i think of when i think aesthetically pleasing, but in this film, the sweaty necks up to hair, back soaking truh to shirts, and shiny faces, primarily of our lead but occasionally others too, are curiously comforting. it just makes people and situations more human, which in a film this tense heightens relateability, and takes the edge off a lil bit. (schoenarts in Bullhead!, come to think of it)

this film is about the other, whiter, generally less talked about side of the immigration/discrimination issue, immigrants who, on the face, due to sharing the same skin color, should have it much easier to integrate in majority white countries, but for…

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…

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…