The Migrants

While filming a report in a problem district of Vienna, TV editor Marlene Weizenhuber (Doris Schretzmayer) comes across Omar (Faris Rahoma) and Tito (Aleksandar Petrovic), who seem to confirm exactly the prejudices associated with young men with a migration background. This would make them the perfect protagonists for a TV documentary series. And indeed: when the two lead the TV team through their neighborhood, confronting them with illegal businesses, prostitution and rival gangs, the ratings skyrocket. The only problem is that Omar's name is actually Benny and Tito's is Marko. The two are genuine Viennese who have allowed themselves a harmless joke that gets completely out of hand. And when the hoax threatens to blow up, the two friends have far more at stake than just their newfound TV careers.

The basic idea behind The Mirantigen is really good and funny: that a TV team chasing ratings only wants to see what will get them those very ratings, and that in a lurid docu-soap there is no room for a differentiated view in the jumble of clichés and prejudices, is unfortunately not something that can be called fiction. Faris Rahoma and Aleksandar Petrovic play the pseudo-checkers so wonderfully overdone that their hoax should have been busted after just a few moments. But the TV editor doesn't realize it, because all she sees is herself climbing the ladder in leaps and bounds by exploiting the fate of these two obviously very simple-minded migrants.

In some scenes, all of this is full of ironic bite and a bitterly wicked backhandedness. If director Arman T. Riahi had managed to pull this off consistently, the comedy would definitely have had the makings of a cult film. But unfortunately, the film keeps running out of steam after the first third. There are still some really good, funny and clever moments in this part of the movie. But there are also scenes in which the humor seems all too well-behaved and in which the film can not quite decide whether it wants to be a comedy, or perhaps a social drama.

So it comes to some extremely weak moments as well as to some humorless lengths. And then the overall impression suffers from that, shrinking from the initial great to a somewhat disappointed well. The Mirantigen is not a bad film, but on balance it is far from what it could have been. And that's why there is only with restrictions still a: Worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp