About the film

Simple craftsmen in Mumbay, petty thieves and prostitutes in Mexico-City, assembly line workers in Moscow and a swindler in New York. At first sight, these figures, often living on the fringes of society in four metropolises, are not really connected. The hawker in Mexico-City, selling self-cooked drumsticks, and the hairdresser in Mumbay, receiving his customers in some sort of converted garage, do not know about each other‘s lives. But what they share is the harsh, daily struggle for survival, in which the likelihood of progress is minimal, but each of them keeps cherishing his own dreams. Director Michael Glawogger is primarily a superb photographer who, by selecting his images with great care, gets down to the root of the matter without using an excess of comment and interview excerpts. The style that he applies both in the frame composition and in editing is never exaggerated or indolent. He does not embellish things, but demonstrates that a heroic urge to survive underlies the daily drabness and misery of life in a big city.At the same time, he manages to reveal the typical traits of each city, like the reading passengers in the Moscow subway. He films them while they are silent, but we hear the stories they could be reading. For instance, about the writer who asks: “where on earth do all these beggars and drifters come from?” Someone answers: “they come crawling from the cracks in the street!” to which the writer says: “that was not what I meant I want to know what has happened to them”.

Wybrane festiwale i nagrody/selected festivals and awards: 1998 - MFF w Sao Paulo, Nagroda Jury dla Najlepszego Filmu Dokumentalnego/Sao Paulo IFF, Jury Prize for Best Documentary, 1998 - MFF Wenecja/Venice IFF, 1999 - MFF San Francisco, Nagroda Golden Spire/San Francisco IFF, Golden Spire Award, 1999 - MFF Vancouver, Nagroda dla Najlepszego Filmu Dokumentalnego/Vancouver IFF, The Best Documentary, 2009 - PLANETE+ DOC FF