By the shores of the Danube, in the shadow of container ships and suspension bridges, the Austrian filmmaker Patric Chiha immerses himself in the Viennese night in order to earn the trust of the young Bulgarian Roma who came there to offer their sex work services in the bars of the imperial city at night.

A film depicting a group, almost a pack. Chiha gradually moves away from a naturalistic representation of reality in order to build a magnetic portrait of a disobedient and (hyper) conscious masculinity.

If faced with the camera, the film’s subjects replay with a disarming ease the artifice of seduction but also the daily exploitation of their flesh. By threading together immigration stories and homoerotic imagery, the filmmaker reveals a strange deception hidden beneath the uprooting of the trade in bodies.

As such, the evident pleasure that the film’s various personalities experience in putting themselves centre stage and revealing themselves through “the game”, allows the film to portray–as if breaking through into an inaccessible world–a more free and complex view of their precarious condition. It is in these suspended moments that the film manages, somewhere between grace and disorientation, to capture and to transmit a feeling of absolute reality.

Terence Chotard
Filmmaker

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