Western

German filmmaker Valeska Grisebach returns with her long-awaited follow-up to 2006’s Longing, focusing on a group of laborers brought over from Deutschland to help build a sustainable infrastructure in a small Bulgarian village. The relationship between the boorish workers and the beleaguered locals is volatile, to put it mildly; caught in the middle of this is Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), a stoic ex-soldier who’s there just to make a buck. At first, his only companion is a white horse he tames and rides, but the quiet, sensitive handyman eventually befriends the town’s gangster-like fixer (Syuleyman Alilov Leitfov) and gets to know his hosts. Some cultural barriers and bad-blood histories, however, can’t simply be washed away. A cutting commentary on the uneasy alliance between Europe’s industrialized nations and their Eastern counterparts, Grisebach’s graceful drama borrows the concept of the tall, honorable stranger to refashion the continent’s identity crisis as a backwards fight between the frontier and encroaching civilization.