Following his father’s funeral in the Polish port of Gdansk, Adam sets off to trace his older brother Jan, last heard of in England after leaving Poland when injury cut short a promising football career.
London is a magnet to those looking for a better life - but its surface liberalism conceals a dark heart of intolerance, greed and exploitation. Adam finds his brother at the core of a crowd of sub-contractors supplying cheap foreign labour to unregulated construction projects in the booming city.
Jan initiates Adam into the secrets of his firm, showing how he smuggles illegal labourers into the UK via a transfer between Polish trawlers and English fishing boats.
Adam meets a beautiful Russian girl Anna who, like Adam, has come to find a new life in London. But he is unaware of the extent of his brother's ruthless ambition.
When a death at his construction site leads to Jan's arrest, Adam instinctively protects him. But discovering shocking evidence of Jan's guilt, Adam is presented with the ultimate test of his loyalty. He must make the most difficult decision of his life: stay loyal to his brother thereby sanctioning the murder of countless immigrants, or betray him to the authorities thus saving Anna from deportation and see his brother sent to jail for life…
“Polish people here have been waiting for a film like OUTLANDERS”
(Marcin Antosiewicz, Polish Radio London)
This Autumn sees the 20th anniversary of the “Round Table” talks led by Lech Walesa, precipitating the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe a year later. OUTLANDERS is a film which tells the story of those born at that time, the first post-communist generation. In May 2004 Poland joined the European Union. This meant that Polish workers no longer required a work permit to work in the UK. It is estimated that 600, 000 Polish workers have arrived in the UK since then (BBC). Poles are now the largest foreign national group in the UK (Institute for Public Policy, 2008). In Southampton one-in-ten of the population is now Polish (BBC). The exact numbers of Poles living and working in the UK is difficult to estimate. Not all those arriving in the UK apply to the Worker Registration Scheme and some of those that have applied may have previously been working in the UK illegally.
Although Polish people can now work legally in the UK, the flexible labour market remains dominated by illegal activity. Unregistered migrant workers are controlled in a complex labour chain by gangmasters; through intimidation, management of pay, ad-hoc deductions for rent and obstruction from opening a bank account. Those working illegally in the UK, from outside the EU, have no protection at all.
The expansion of Europe and the demand for cheap labour has led to poor working conditions.
Each year hundreds of migrants are killed “working the black” in Western Europe. The media has exposed a multitude of health and safety breaches with migrant workers. Officially the Health and Safety Executive recorded 72 deaths in the construction industry in 2007/08, 12 of which were migrant workers, unofficially the figures may be far higher.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT - DOMINIC LEES
As a film-maker and a Londoner I am fascinated by how the city is changing with the energy of new migrants from Eastern Europe. Like many cities worldwide, London’s a place undergoing frantic change, powered by the energy of its newcomers. This is a film about a city – but seen through the eyes of its outsiders. These migrants are a film’s natural heroes because they have been driven by ambition or desperation to come searching for a better life.
Every migrant wants to find work and wealth, but there’s a personal story beneath this drive, something that burns so strong that it forces them to leave home. It may be about searching, often it is about escaping. In OUTLANDERS, Adam must search for his brother in order to rekindle a childhood bond that he cannot bear to lose. Janek has escaped to London, where he can leave behind the tragic disappointments of his youth - and reinvent himself.
These personal stories are what makes OUTLANDERS universal. And the experience of London is the same as cities the world over, where wealth and urban opportunity give a magnetic pull for outsiders. I set the film in London amongst East Europeans because I know Polish and studied in Warsaw, but it could have been set in Dubai amongst Indian labourers, California amongst Hispanics, coastal China amongst rural migrants.
The making of OUTLANDERS perfectly reflects the film’s reality. Its locations are the streets of London where generations of migrants have built their communities; it was shot by a small, mobile crew on a modest budget with complete freedom and with a cast whose own backgrounds mimic their characters’ stories. Look at the credits for the Extras: each of those East Europeans was a migrant working in London who responded to our call for help in making OUTLANDERS. That’s why this film is genuine storytelling: you can believe that each face you see has a real story to tell. And not one frame of the film was shot by a native Londoner, every image has been created by the eye of an outsider. Indeed, among the entire cast and crew of over 200 there were no more than half a dozen English nationals. The film reveals our reality from a different perspective, it shows hidden worlds and lives that exist beside us but which we rarely recognize.
FROM MULTI-BAFTA AWARD WINNING WRITER JIMMY GARDNER A THRILLER INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS
