Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Pinho’sTHE NOTHING FACTORY takes home the FIPRESCI Prize in Cannes, with the jury’s verdict as follows:"An evocative activist film that blows the boundaries between reality, fiction, theater and sociological discourse leading to an unsettling and provocative cinematic experience.” but, it is an overstatement, because there is nothing unsettling and provocative in this meandering docu-drama, a hodgepodge of didactic, verbose theoretical discussions and workadaymiserabilism perpetuating around a cohort of blue-collar workers who are saddled with a massive layoff.

Most courageously, the film offers its audience a fine-tooth combing of the downside of capitalism, and hammers home the inevitability of its failing which is behind the lift-manufacturing factory’s dodgy maneuver, smuggling heavy machines out in the night, so they can start anew in other places while ditching the current one with their labor surplus. But it suffers from being a typical talk-the-talk endeavor which to this reviewer’s lights, is flogging a dead horse.

After negotiating with the shysters hired by the factory owner reaches a standstill, summarily, the workers are left with a half-empty factory and they decide to operate the business on their own despite that no one is equipped with the know-how of management. Anticlimactically, a seemingly propitious order from Argentina doesn’t necessarily elicit the hardship-defying mettle which the story-line half-heartedly suggests, apart from an out-of-nowhere musical sequence, whose feigned elation comes a bit too late to dispel the dreadful tenor holding its stranglehold on this nearly 3-hour long realism-evoking overreacher.

Character-arc straggles unsystematically, and what Pinho and his team actually excel is the atmospheric construct: a disconsolate Lisbon colored with invariably somber hue refracts Pinho's own personalistic rumination of the city and his compassion to his beleaguered subjects might not be immediately felt, because self-consciously he knows he is trying to tackle with something much bigger, but to little avail (it is not that a solution is a requisite, but Pinho’s scattershot pieces simply do not cohere as a narrative feature). Just like the contrived materialization of a bevy of ostriches loping in the wilderness during the film's middle passage, he intends to speak for those ostracized, marginalized, underprivileged, but visionary illumination is in dire paucity.

referential point: Miguel Gomes’ARABIAN NIGHT: VOLUME 3 - THE ENCHANTED ONE (2015, 6.3/10)

破敗工廠

變故，一直以來都被人們所排斥，原因在于被動的接受環(huán)境帶來的改變，以及因為變故而給生活帶來的影響，本片就講述了一群遭遇了變故的工人的故事，老板受中國產品的影響，產品滯銷，迫不得已要關閉工廠，并對工人進行補償，而工人希望的不僅僅是賠償，而是保持生活與工作的穩(wěn)定。對話失敗，這注定是一場沒有硝煙，沒有贏家的戰(zhàn)爭。

資方希望盡快解決以止損，勞方則希望保持工作，當管理者消失工人們開始自救時，開始化被動為主動，適應變故的同時尋求新的出路；改變是痛苦的，一如接受現實，當生存受到威脅的時候，人們自然會放棄信念，工人說，如果我的孩子明天就要挨餓，那我今天一定會去領取補償金！尊嚴已經不重要了，只要我的孩子們可以有飯吃，工人們的內部也并非團結，相互之間僅存一點點共患難的信任，包括對公會也不能信任，尋找是一段成長和蛻變。當人們換上工裝，不知道要做什么的時候，影片運用了長時間的靜音處理，死一般的寂靜，隱藏不住每個人內心的暗潮洶涌！時代在改變，高效的運行方式勢必然取代低效。

工廠是這樣，社會亦同樣。當人們習慣了被管理的思維，自治便成為一件可笑的事情，因為竟然沒有愿意承擔責任與風險的管理者，一切又回到原點。