Spare Parts

Ludvik (Peter Musevski) is a former Slovenian speedway champion turned immigrant smuggler. His boss hires him a young assistant, called Rudi (Alijosa Kovcic). By night they bundle Slovenian immigrants into the back of a van for 1000 Euros apiece and dump them at the Italian border.

This is a life of survival and false hopes. Set in Krsko, home of former Yugoslavia's only nuclear plant, people's lives are lived in limbo. Ludvik runs his shady racket from within a large warehouse. By day he and his colleagues drink beer, watch the speedway, screw the female immigrants and plan their next scoop.

Beneath this murky underworld, lies even more dirt. Ludvik is a flatulent, urine drinking, middle-ager with cancer, who likes to refer to himself in the third person. He has little to say, besides his distrust of the EU: "I hope as long as I live, Slovenia doesn't join f***ing Europe."

This is a nation full of hatred, resentment and pain. Rudi, his young sidekick, absorbs all this enigmatically. He, too, lives life for the moment, and has little to say for himself. His initial sympathy for the immigrants soon hardens and his job is just a job like any other, a means to an end.

Slovenian punk rocker director, Damjan Kozole has opted for gritty realism at a time when issues of immigration are tight on everyone's lips. There are no free trips to paradise in this world. What goes on, goes on, because one half wants a taste of freedom and the other wants to make a fast buck in a world that's cost them lots but provided little. The downfall is the general lack of character development. More could have been made of both Rudi and Ludvik, but then Kozole is deliberately painting a picture of a class with more to do than say.

In the end, Kozole's message is that people are commodities and those doing the exploiting are just as vulnerable and nothing good lasts forever.