Writer and Director: Sudabeh Mortezai
Corporate responsibility and the debate between preserving cultural heritage invested in people and practices versus progress is the subject of Europa, Sudabeh Mortezai multinational film set in Albania involving an American company, a German negotiator and co-funded by Film 4 so much of the action takes place or is translated into English so characters can understand one another. Just who to sympathise with flips repeatedly during this 100-minute film while director Mortezai captures the beauty of the Albanian landscape and its traditional, agricultural ways of living.
Beate Winter is a corporate negotiator who meets a series of families during a trip to one valley in Albania where her firm needs to buy all of the houses and the land. Facing a couple of problem clients, Beate strategises how to win them round, assuring people that safety and a better life awaits. But can you really put a price on tradition and inheritance?
Europa plays with ideas of individual and collective responsibility and the extent to which characters on both sides of the divide behave inappropriately. Beate certainly makes a lot of promises in the belief that an urban, monied life is preferable to the one the Albanian locals have, and for some living in dilapidated conditions, this might be the opportunity they have waited their lives for. That is especially in the context of company Europa’s investment in female leadership and the promise of a scholarship for one local girl. Yet, as the story infolds, Beate’s social justice veneer becomes gradually thinner, willing to go to any lengths to get deals done which adds greatly to the film’s debate.
But Mortezai is often equally ambiguous about the responses of Albanian men in particular to this offer, and while the connection to land and personal inheritance are credible and sympathetic reasons to hold on to what they believe is ancestral land, some of the patriarchs refuse to permit a different kind of future for their daughters, even if they wish it, one character going so far as to say his child would be better as a farmer than the doctor she would prefer.
As Beate, Lilith Stangenberg treads a fine line between deeply sympathetic and supportive of the local people, seemingly absorbing the stories and fears they share with her, proactively looking for compromise solutions to make it work for everyone. Yet, there is a corporate steel in her that puts her other behaviours into a new perspective; is she kind or just pretending to be to get the job done? Either way, Stangenberg still makes her very human.
Europa doesn’t do enough with the secondary storyline about Beate’s family life which starts to add another dimension to her, but never completes the thought or properly investigates her job and her relationship with an attentive assistant. A tad overlong, Mortezai’s film is an interesting analysis of corporate tactics and the different dynamics at play when selecting not only how to live but what price you’re willing to pay to give it all up.
Europa is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
