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An undocumented Latvian works in a meat factory in Belgium and falls into the hands of a Polish mafia. With "Oleg", the Latvian filmmaker Juris Kursietis tells a deeply European story, where high hopes and descent into hell collide. Harsh images from a terrifying reality.
For once, the migrant on screen does not come from Africa, Asia or the East, it comes from Europe itself. He does not take the canoe , does not walk hundreds of kilometers, but simply embarks aboard a plane to try to escape the misery and debts accumulated in his country, Latvia .
When Europe becomes a meat factory
How to create images in the cinema without damaging the truth of terror? To tell his story in Europe today, Juris Kursietis, 36, alternates metaphorical and even biblical images with long, ultra-realistic sequences. Oleg, his antihero, finds himself alternately under the ice of a frozen lake surrounded by snow-covered forests, transformed into a sacrificial lamb and thrown like a gladiator worker into the arena of a meat factory near Brussels.
Based on real facts and far from being anecdotal, Oleg's fate turns when he leaves Riga to work as a butcher's boy in Brussels. The meat factory quickly becomes a metaphor for its inhuman condition, deprived of any right and any real European citizenship. He is one of those non-citizen citizens made in Latvia during the Soviet era when foreigners came to work without becoming full citizens.
A passport of " alien "
Oleg lands with his passport "alien" in Brussels. Very quickly, he realizes himself to become a merchandise cut into slices according to the rules of the market. When a colleague wrongly accuses him of having injured him, he loses his job. The trap closes. Oleg will fall prey to a Polish mafia, condemned to become a modern slave in a society with freedoms and rights of variable geometry.
The staging is impressive with its impressive realism, embodied by the incredibly intuitive playing of Valentin Novopolskij, further reinforced by the square image format used and the close-ups of the actor. The way of filming the mental and physical confinement of Oleg is reminiscent of Ken Loach's cinematographic thoroughness and the Dardennes brothers' way of rendering pressure and social failure without fail. Juris Kursietis films camera on the shoulder. Without distance and without filter, it puts us face to the dismay of the man, to the whitish light of the slaughterhouse, to the bluish atmosphere of the parallel universes.
" I am an eternal stranger "
Oleg, who has just won the Grand Prize of the Central and Eastern European Film Festival (CinEast) in Luxembourg, is a European story from Latvia , a small Baltic country of 2 million inhabitants, a member state of the European Union. since 2004. After Kursietis' investigations in Brussels of Latvians employed in meat factories in Belgium and exploited by Polish Mafiosi, the Polish Film Institute eventually refused to co-finance the film. By creating Oleg , this fresco on the theme of the eternal foreigner, the Latvian filmmaker inflicts us with his second feature film a lesson film and citizen on a deliberately hidden reality of our European societies. He is content to show this social tower of Babel (a sort of refactualization of Metropolis by Fritz Lang). It's up to us to decide, between bending, thinking and acting.