Critics reviews

You might bracket the film as a dirt-flecked piece of contemporary neo-realism with some documentary baggage attached, as Tanovic essentially co-opts a real Roma family for the purposes of the film and, outside of the central drama, much of what we see is a realistic portrait of how these people fight to get by. On a broader level, the film is also a damning indictment of capitalism, particularly as a force which has become divorced from any humanist concerns.

Restrained of most overt stylistic trappings and all the better for it is Danis Tanovic's An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, which lives up to the cyclical patterns suggested by the film's title... Tanovic's handheld aesthetic pristinely juxtaposes metallic decay with layers of snow and mud, then bisects each composition with the sluggish movements of worn down men.

...Things didn't improve with the Jury Grand Prize, which went to Tanovic's film, and to make it perfectly clear why they liked it so much, the jury also gave Nazif Mujić the Best Actor Award— for essentially playing himself. A fraudulent exercise in miserabilism, An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker is ostensibly based on Mujić's own story, and Tanovicć milks this setup for all it's worth: real people portraying their really shitty lives.

A significant departure from his earlier work, which I have never been overly enthralled by, this micro-budget film's merging of documentary and fiction (a Gypsy family in Bosnia essentially play themselves) ensures that, in recounting a scrap-metal merchant's odyssey through the country's privatised health care system when his uninsured wife suffers a miscarriage, it stays just on the right side of melodrama.