One Day in Europe
film — Germany — 2005

7.0
Actually I was going to see a different film but since it somehow didn`t work properly with the video projector there`s was no other option but than watch "One Day in Europe". I first learned to know that such a film existed quite a long time ago (circa 4 months I guess) when there was the first information about a festival of German football-related films in Riga. I was even intending to go and see "ODiE" at the cinema but I didn`t do it. Since the film watching event was a bit wider than my usual audience of 1 person I had my little concerns about how this film will come off with the audience. After all 3 of 6 spectators were of the feminine sex and girls typically don`t care much for football and films on football. Luckily I didn`t warn them what we were going to see, therefore no one had a chance to start arguing before switching the film on. Later on it proved that the film wasn`t about football after all, more likely it was a film about foreigners in trouble in different places in Europe. The film contains four separate stories, chained together by the football Champions League final game happening on the day when all other evens also take place. The first one is set in Moscow where a she-tourist gets robbed by some armed bandits and she tries to get help from the local police where nobody pays much interest for you, nobody speaks English and nobody believes that thieves can be caught. The second story is set in Istambul where a German tourist doesn`t get robbed but pretends that he did. He jumps into a cab and wants to go to a police station but the cab driver starts searching for the thieves on his own, not knowing that they don`t exist in fact. In the third story a Hungarian tourist lets a villain get away with his digital camera containing about 1500 shots. He must overgo a long and boring trip with a policeman to the office, at first it seems that this time for once there will be no problems for the city is packed with surveillance cameras, the only trouble is that some guard has spent a lot of time examining women`s legs and not filming the gate near which the man was robbed. The last scene is about a young French couple in Berlin who make their living from street performances but when the living is not enough they decide to simulate that... they have been robbed. In the end the cops don`t buy their story and the couple flees on the police car. As for the football - lots of supporters appear on the screen very often, and we learn to know that the game between Galatasaray and Deportivo La Coruna ended 1:1 and there were penalties.
2006-01-25
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