(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
It was with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that the framework of my life suddenly opened. Now we could go back to Prague, my hometown my father had talked about so much through my childhood. As a trained state citizen, I moved to the Czech capital in the autumn of 1990, and by chance I was called one afternoon by the very environment minister Varvoušek. He wondered if he could send me a car and have me shipped over to the ministry immediately. Varvoušek and his team sat with a group of Norwegians around the table in a negotiating room without being able to communicate; the contracts were therefore unsigned on the table. This is how I got my first job, and this is how I got to know the small Norwegian business community that specializes in heavy industry in Eastern Europe.
Naive. I was a blue-eyed optimist and thought it was hardly possible to utter words like "Norwegian" and "corruption" in one sentence. But after observing, at a good distance, power negotiations within this Norwegian group, I became aware that the world was not as simple as we had learned at school. In short: The one who made the most noise and provoked, ended up with a deployment to Russia. After that it became quiet.
Ten years later, I met the same man at a cocktail party in Oslo, but did not dare interrogate me properly about how things had worked out in Moscow. Back I just got a wry smile. It was as if something had broken inside him. Now the man is dead, and my questions about what it was like to work as a Western top leader in Russia remain unanswered.
I thought it was hardly possible to utter words like "Norwegian" and "corruption" in one sentence.
Charged rescuer. So it was with great interest that I sat down to watch the documentary The Russian Job by Petr Horký, who recently premiered at the Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival. The film takes on Swedish top boss Bo Inge Andersson's journey to a province in Russia to save a dying company with 60 employees: the AvtoVAZ factory, which manufactures, among other things, the Lada cars. Andersson has several successes in the automotive industry, and is known for turning low-profit companies into highly profitable ones., as he did with both Saab and General Motors. His goal with the Russia job is to revitalize Charging and producing a new car model that can compete in the international market. This becomes the red thread throughout the film. We follow the process from idea to, amazingly, the launch of Lada Vesta, the model that will be the best-selling Lada car ever.
But despite this undoubted success, it smacks among factory workers: Andersson's radical measures to halve the number of workers to 30 are not met with understanding.
Beautiful debut. The Russian Job is the journalist Horký's film debut. Commissioned by a Czech economic journal, Horký first went to AvtoVAZ to interview Bo Andersson with a view to a longer report. However, as a witness to the absurd situations that arose between the energetic Andersson and the local workers, he decided to make a film about the events. With the team he got the talented cameraman Milan Bureš and the mower Filip Veselý – and the result is a beautifully composed documentary. The pictures of wide, snow-covered plains, loose dogs greeting workers at the entrance gate, workers walking to their posts without really knowing what and why they are there, meeting rooms with thousands of departmental leaders who fall asleep through the morning meetings, factory with their continuous floods, decrepit pipes and empty halls – everything is put together in a great way.
Good despite the shortcomings. A very visual story – natural enough for a movie – but when it comes to the portrayal of Andersson, Wikipedia is actually a more interesting source than Horký's film. Andersson, with a degree from Militärhögskolan Karlberg and Harvard Business School, looks like a forty-one-year-old, but amazingly has passed the 60s. He appears to be a comfortable closed person with no outward signs of the tremendous trials he has been through Russian car factory.
Bo Andersson is held personally responsible for a $ XNUMX billion loss, despite the fact that he managed to produce Lada's most popular car model ever.
Unfortunately, we never get to the heart of the problems; it is through Katecina, a leader in Andersson's Czech team and the mistress of Sweden, we get the brief, incoherent stories of the absurd situation Andersson and his employees are in. Katecina whispers quickly that we must stay at least 60 meters from the buildings if we are to talk together and take us out on an icy lake. "We didn't realize we were being intercepted. Had we known what awaited us here, we would have prepared better. "
It's obvious that Katecina is nervous – her voice is shaking – but her paranoid state is hard to understand as long as we get to know so little about what's really going on. The fact that Bo Andersson has fallen out of favor with his former friend Putin and is held personally responsible for a $ XNUMX billion loss even though he produced Lada's most popular car model ever, are examples of important things the film does not disclose.
Despite their shortcomings: The Russian Job a fascinating, beautiful, stylish and entertaining movie.
