Harbour, Labour, Neighbour: Review of THE THING TO BE DONE

A co-production between Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia, Srđan Kovačević’s The Thing to Be Done, which premiered at the 68th DOK Leipzig, also found its spot at Linz’s Crossing Europe Film Festival. Selected for its regular Working Worlds sidebar, it is a prime example for the programme, dealing with actual working conditions in 21st-century Europe. Focusing on big problems in a small nation, Kovačević zooms into Slovenia—to an ex-Yugoslav mind, a model country—and reveals its gory insides, spilling its nationalist, racist, and labour exploitation guts all over the screen. Given Kovačević’s capitalism- and post-YU society-focused DOP and director background, with films like his own Factory to the Workers (2021), Filip Mojzeš’s Motel (2023), and Boris Bakal’s Vitić Pleše (2023), a documentary about immigrant workers’ conditions in Slovenia comes as an organic continuation of his career. 
 
The Thing to Be Done follows three social workers boxed into a Kafkaesque office, doing everything they can to help underpaid or unpaid immigrant workers fight for their legal rights. With a sense of urgency of an ER, the Workers’ Advocacy Office in the heart of Ljubljana seems to be the only shelter for primarily Bosnian immigrants worked to the bone in what was supposed to be a land of financial hope. While a large percentage of Slovenia’s wealth comes exactly from these exploited workers, one of the Advocacy employees, Goran Zrnić, warns them of what they truly are: citizens of a third-world country. “This is capitalism, and Tito is no more,” he reminds men and women who bury their hopes in 14-hour-long work shifts, because there’s nowhere else to go. 
 
Zrnić, a former construction worker and Bosnian immigrant himself, knows firsthand the exploitation of labour. Coming from the city of Banja Luka—flattened in the English subtitles simply into “Bosnia”—he now works what seems like a 24-hour shift; yet, unlike his clients, he possesses the paperwork that earns some privilege. However, we later learn, this is not quite enough: even those raised in Slovenia are not considered sufficiently. The never-ending ringing of both the cell phone and the office line underlines the number of exploited labourers, the office’s workload, and even their safety, as Goran answers his phone while driving, while his co-worker Laura’s mistake costs one of the immigrants their papers. 
 
Just like Laura, Kovačević’s camera seems to be too busy, wandering around from one exhausted face to another in devastating close-ups of swallowed emotions. The crowded screen traps the viewer into the already spaceless office, and lets them out once the workers free themselves, with parallel editing of the Kopar harbour protest scenes consisting mostly of wide shots. It is the very act of documenting this often-ignored reality that leaves us thinking, ‘thank God for cameras.’ It also makes us think, ‘thank God for humour’, as Zrnić meets his clients with a strain of dark wit that sets a hopeful mood of this otherwise difficult documentary. A humour that, however, registers as distinctly Balkan: his quips drew few, if any, laughs from the Austrian audience at the Linz screening. 
 
Despite those obvious cultural specificities, Kovačević’s film deals with a far more universal issue of the mechanisms of exploitation. Winning the Interreligious Jury Award at DOK Leipzig proves it, too: modern slavery knows no geography, no religion, and no borders.