29/10/2024 - Apolena Rychlíková's immersive documentary shows the drama of cheap labourers working in Western Europe

Apolena Rychlíková’s Limits of Europe [+see also:
interview: Apolena Rychlíková
film profile] competed in the Central and Eastern European Competition at the 31st Astra Film Festival (20-27 October), where it was also shown in the thematic sidebar Easterners in the West, showcasing documentaries about the cheap labourers hailing from Eastern, underdeveloped European countries and working in the Western, well-to-do Europe. Shot mainly with a hidden camera by its protagonist, Czech journalist Saša Uhlová, this documentary is a hard-hitting look at poverty and modern slavery and also an ode to the most vulnerable members of the society.

At the film's beginning, we see Uhlová trying to find a job on a German farm, which proves rather easy even though she doesn’t speak the language. Indeed, the language barrier is not an issue for her future employers as they are eager to welcome hard-working workers who accept the meagre pay of only €6 per hour. Leaving behind her family, including her ailing father, in Prague, the protagonist goes to the farm, where she documents the atmosphere and the abuses she endures with her hidden camera. After one month here, she will find a job as a maid in an Irish hotel and then will go to Marseille, where she will provide care for the sick and elderly via a nursing company. All these activities are regulated, but the laws are too lax, the employers too eager to bend them and the authorities too indifferent to make sure they are observed.

Through Uhlová’s shaky camera, we are given access into a convoluted eco-system formed by people who are forced, by a lack of opportunities, to leave behind their native countries, the companies that act as intermediaries between the workers and their prospective employers, and the beneficiaries of their affordable work. Limits of Europe is not an easy watch, as we soon find out this is a world where abuse lurks around every corner. We see workers exhausted after 12, even 14 hours in the cold fields, knowing they will sleep only five hours that night just to get up at 4:30 in the morning to be back in the field at 5:30. Employees are bullied and cheated by their employers. At times, the film feels like a dystopian fiction, as when a supervisor in the German farm messes up the hands of the clock so that the workers won't know how long they’ll have to work before their lunch break.

Watching from a comfortable, warm cinema seat, it is hard to acknowledge that many millions of Europeans will not hesitate to accept these working conditions just to receive wages between €1,000 and €1,500. Millions accepted them over the last decades, when the fall of the Iron Curtain threw entire countries into a difficult transition towards democracy that came with rampant inflation and extreme poverty. It is sad that, decades later, too many are still willing to follow the same itinerary from the East to the West, with the same undignified consequences.

A true value of the documentary is Uhlová’s voice-over commentary. We follow her personal feelings when her aching hands deal with tonnes of cabbages, onions and kohlrabies or when she has to clean the rooms on an entire hotel floor just by herself, her phone screen lighting up with angry messages from the manager. The documentary gives a voice to many over-worked men and women following their dream of a better life, only to discover thir dream is a nightmare and, when they wake up, that life isn’t much better. Even if the documentary doesn’t exactly go there, for every woman working in these conditions, there may be children left behind at home, growing up without their mother and meeting her only over two weeks in the summer, when she is too exhausted to even enjoy this short respite.

Limits of Europe was produced by Hypermarket Film (Czech Republic) and co-produced by Kolam Productions (France) and KerekesFilm (Slovak Republic).