21/08/2023 - Sudabeh Mortezai’s follow-up to the award-winning Joy is a blistering political drama set in Albania

Europa [+see also:
interview: Sudabeh Mortezai
film profile] is one of the most highly anticipated titles to premiere at this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival, where it was competing for the main prize. The third feature by acclaimed Iranian-German filmmaker Sudabeh Mortezai follows a businesswoman on her work trip to rural Albania, where she has to facilitate a deal between the local landowners and the company she works for.

Lilith Stangenberg (Wild [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) is courageous as Beate, a cut-throat wannabe company exec whose sympathetic demeanour is constantly at odds with her reserved words and gestures. She lets the matriarch of the derelict house she visits hold her hand, but on the way out, she reaches for the antibacterial gel. She accepts a glass of raki, but makes sure to dispose of it secretly. A composed (almost overly so) businesswoman whose elegant clothes and neat chignon stand out in this region of poverty and depopulation, Beate is the incarnation of both power and powerlessness. Mortezai is particularly good at highlighting these contradictions between “us” and “them”, and zooming in on the problematic consequences such binaries entail. Europa is no exception, even if it is a bit smoother around the edges in comparison to the feverish unease of Joy [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Sudabeh Mortezai
film profile].

Beate is the film’s protagonist, but she surely isn’t the main character. The movie provides enough room for families, houses, rituals, farms and religious spaces of the region, and presents a rich tapestry of independent, proud people who’d rather stick to their land instead of giving in to a lucrative cash offer. The conflict between city and village as a dwelling place does not exist as such in Beate’s mind, and the way she moves through this foreign reality is detached and noticeably cold. Mortezai’s regular cinematographer Klemens Hufnagl, whose use of affective closeness and dynamism made Joy emanate a specific kind of anxious intimacy, here tracks Stangenberg as she ploughs through interior and exterior spaces without a hint of interaction.

As for EUROPA, the corporation represented by Beate, it is perhaps the film’s murkiest subject. Not only is their business kept under wraps, but it’s also suggested that their owning a well-guarded military zone in the valley is just the tip of the iceberg. The audience may get an inkling of what this corporation might be like, but the ambiguity does take away some of the thriller notes that the film could easily incorporate and make work to its advantage. Dispossession masked as philanthropy is a practice bequeathed by colonial thinking, and the film makes it clear that good and bad intent are often interchangeable within such a context.

Europa doesn’t try to reconcile the two sides, the privileged and the underprivileged. Instead, it builds a bridge for us, as viewers, to see how they interact and to appreciate the ambiguity of power relations in a situation that is starkly dramatic, because the stakes are so high. The battle of people’s generational homes versus corporate expansion and profit-seeking may seem like a lost cause. Mortezai tucks away some hope in the film’s supporting characters and in the cracks that appear in Beate’s perfect image, but spares us any resolute stance as to who is the winner and who is the loser. Bearing in mind that all of this is a product of centuries of violent power games spanning the map of Europe and the whole world, maybe there is neither one nor the other.

Europa was produced by Austria’s Fratella Filmproduktion in co-production with the UK’s Good Chaos and Film4. Memento International handles the international sales.