Exile (Exil)

It starts with a dead rat hanging on the garden fence. Then a work meeting is moved to another room but no one bothers to tell him. Xhafer, the successful engineer from Kosovo, is well-integrated into Germany with a terraced house, wife, and children: that is what it looks like, and that is how he sees it – but do the others also see it the same way? Xhafer's feelings of deliberate harassment and exclusion keep increasing, making him more and more tense and feeling as if he could explode at any moment. But is Xhafer really being mobbed on purpose, or is he just hypersensitive? Are his colleagues cool and distant because he is a "foreigner", or do they just find him unlikable as a person – as his wife throws in his face at one point, for even their relationship is anything but a smooth one. Amidst the often impersonal and almost desolate setting of a successful, middle-class German existence, director Visar Morina narrates an intriguing psychodrama that raises questions about integration, belonging and alienation, as well as how the sense of identity can tip into paranoia.

Image © Komplizen Film