An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker – DVD review

Danis Tanovic, 2013

New Wave Films

Scrap-metal scavenger Nazif tears apart old cars to scrape a hand-to-mouth living for his family, who live in a Roma community on the fringes of a Bosnian town. When his wife Senada miscarries, he has to find an impossible sum of money for an operation to save her life. Tanovic’s bleak piece of documentary-style realism has no actors: instead, it uses the real-life people affected to tell their story. Its fly-on-the-wall style, all industrial grime and grinding poverty, movingly captures the hardscrabble existence of the Roma.