Writer and Director: Ami-Ro Sköld
Receiving its world premier at the BFI London Film Festival 2022, Ami-Ro Sköld’s The Store is part exploration of deteriorating work pace dynamics and part social justice drama that expands into the tough personal lives of a group of supermarket employees. Combining some charming stop-motion animation and filmed sequences, The Store is a bleak but engaging examination of structural breakdown and its consequences.
When Eleni returns to work week safter giving birth, she is promoted to manager in place of a colleague but the owner pressurises her to cut the wage bill and rather than lose anyone she decides to make a 10% cut across everyone’s hours. But her efforts are resented by staff, all of whom have their own reason for needing the little overtime on offer.
Sköld’s film manages the building pressure extremely well. A long movie at 2 hours and 20-minutes, it slowly constructs both the fraught working environment and all of the personal stories leading to a breaking point about 40-minutes before the end. Though never a happy team the erosion of social relationships and the resentful, competitive spirit that Sköld creates is really intriguing as colleagues start to loiter at work, try to cheat or anticipate Eleni’s system and clamber over one another for the work they all so desperately need, giving The Store a light touch of Ballard.
The family stories then add depth and credibility, looking at the reality for the employees, Jackie (Daysury Valencia) who hides her pregnancy in order to remain viable for work, single father Aadin (Arbi Alviati) facing debt problems as he tries to support his daughters and even the beleaguered Eleni (Eliza Sica) herself who battles on all fronts as her judgemental mother makes her feel guilty for leaving her baby while her team pick at her decision-making. It creates a really affecting picture of working-class lives and the true existence of service industry workers that people rarely notice, or only ever complain to.
Sköld’s animation is a highlight, used to distinguish between shop floor activities and the real behind-the-scenes interactions of stockrooms and home lives where the staff becoming real, complex people. The crumbling nature of the figures adds a sense of decay, this is not a cartoonish child-friendly world but a place of soulless drudgery and the physical creation of it is excellent and evocative, a smart contrast between the customer-focused dramas that are routine and somehow less real than the operational dramas behind them.
Sköld devotes a little too much time to Aadin’s family and a happy day out over other stories that unbalances the tone as well as a subplot about homeless people stealing food from the waste bins that shows the degree of local desperation but doesn’t add much to the story, lengthening the running time, but The Store is a compassionate portrait of working life and the mini-tragedies of everyday life.
The Store is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2022.
