Review of Made in EU (2025)
Seen in 2026.
In March of 2020, wage slaves at a textile factory in rural Bulgaria downplay warnings about COVID-19 until one of them collapses on the floor. Because she’s the first one tested for the disease, she’s the natural scapegoat for the company.
In April, at the height of the local outbreak, an old doctor says to the “independent” investigator from the capital: “Under communism, what they told us about communism was all lies. But what they told us about capitalism was true.”
This film brought back the pandemic for me. It’s used as a near-biblical time of plague and reckoning. That’s a very good idea for a modern mythology, but it is forced so hard into a framework of secular socialist realism that a little bit of Robert Bresson creeps into it alongside the dominant style of Ken Loach. It’s an awkward but interesting combination. In the Bressonian layer, ostracism within the working class brings the personal suffering to its peak. The Loachian layer keeps it grounded in a linear progression, with no sense of apocalypticism.