Peter Bradshaw 

An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker review – unexpectedly affecting Roma study

This realist study about a Bosnian family who just scrape by is lit up by the couple's quiet love for each other, writes Peter Bradshaw
  
  

An Episode In The Life Of An Iron Picker
Moving … An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker. Photograph: PR

Danis Tanovic is the Bosnian film-maker whose No Man's Land (2001) was one of the most memorable films about the 1990s ex-Yugoslavia wars. This is very different in style: a lower-budget, handheld-realist study of a Roma family in a remote Bosnian village, living on the poverty borderline; it's a grim film in many ways, but strangely and unexpectedly affecting. Nazif (Nazif Mujic) is a guy who scrapes a living as an "iron picker": he finds wrecked cars and smashes them up with his axe to sell the bits for scrap. He uses the same axe to cut branches for firewood in the local forest.

His wife Senada (Senada Alimanovic) stays at home with their two kids and a third is on the way. The family get by, but they have no medical insurance, and this fact – along with the hospital authorities' intransigence – is to lead them into an awful crisis.

Their lives are very bleak, and there's an almost Solzhenitsynian ring to that title. Nazif and Senada exist in a world almost outside society, almost outside any concept of the nation state. What lights up the screen is Nazif's quiet, undemonstrative love for Senada, and hers for him. It is finally very moving.

 

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