I can always count on festival films to bring to light the current crises in the world, and just by the sheer numbers, the current crisis today is the plight of refugees and immigration around the world. So along comes Karl Markovic’s Nobadi, which thankfully takes the issue into a truly weird direction.
Robert (Heinz Trixner) is an elderly man living in a nice home in Vienna. He awakes to find that his dog is dead. While burying the dog in his backyard, he accidentally breaks his pickax thanks to a stubborn tree’s difficult root system.
“…comes across a day laborer named Adib…and out of compassion hires him…”
Robert drives into town to pick up a new ax handle. He comes across a day laborer named Adib (Borhanulddin Hassan Zadeh), who has trouble walking on his left foot, and out of compassion, hires him to help remove the tree stump. What we have now is the classic confrontation between generations, economics, and culture, and it all plays out at the dinner table as Robert prepares a TV dinner for Adib for lunch. Robert realizes Muslims can’t have pork, so he cracks open a can of his dog’s beef dog food as a suitable substitute.
Adib takes it all in stride. The two talk about their life experiences. Adib came to live in Austria after being held in a NATO refugee camp in Afghanistan. Robert talks about his own experiences with “camps” in the war (no references as to which war or what kind of camp). After lunch, the two successfully remove the tree, and Robert goes off to get Adib pay.
"…it takes such a turn that it actually caused several members of the audience to walk out."
