Editor’s Pitch

The dirty little phrase that many speak under their breaths is the subject of Waiting for Europe. “Migrant Workers” are a group between a rock and a hard place – loved for the jobs few want at a price native workers rarely offer. A free open Europe has brought tremendous opportunity to those who were separated from it before the borders and job markets were opened up, and yet there always seems to be a price to be paid for freedom. Vania and Ivo are like many of us in their hopes, just not in their circumstance. It’s heartbreaking and sometimes horribly funny to see what they put themselves through – a story that’s all to relevant to a backlash that seems close on the EU horizon.


Waiting for Europe documents the 5 year journey of Vania, a young Bulgarian woman who leaves her birth home in search of a better life in Western Europe.

Her travels take her first to Portugal as she follows her boyfriend to find work in the industrialised city of Oporto. Once there, she is informed that her papers will not allow her to work legally because Bulgaria is yet to be part of the European Union. But in Oporto, as in other such cities in the west, illegality is no impediment to employment, and Vania manages to find under-the-table work in a café working for a sleazy boss who brazenly and cheerfully exploits her.

In Waiting for Europe, our director Christine Reech artfully captures the latent hypocrisy of the western metropolis. On the one hand, the grandeur of its historical places and industrialised sheen give Opoto a superficial kudos. But we are also allowed to witness another Oporto - a grim and seedy underworld, rife with exploitation and overflowing with eastern European immigrants, the majority struggling, alienated and homesick.

Vania and her boyfriend Ivo cultivate a remarkably stoic attitude to the frequent poor treatment they receive at the hands of their openly racist new compatriots. They move from job to job and seem to be getting a foothold in Portuguese society. And before long they have both gained a decent command of Portuguese. However even this is no guarantee of reliable employment, and they are forced to move to Spain as Ivo takes another job in the Spanish Capital.

And the pattern of abuse continues again – except this time it’s far worse.

The hostility they encounter there makes the discrimination they experienced in Portugal seem genteel by comparison while Vania’s attempts to master Spanish are hampered by her lack of employment opportunities. She and Ivo quickly become ghettoised; interacting only with fellow Bulgars making further progress seem impossible.

This is a remarkable study of the process of alienation that occurs when economic migrants invite themselves into foreign communities on the lookout for better opportunities.

No matter what hardships Vania and Ivo relate to, relatives and friends back at home persist in creating a romantic image of European opportunity. Ironically, the portrait Reech creates of Bulgaria seems to demonstrate a county with far greater riches to offer the couple than the Iberian dream. Perhaps not in jobs, but in a culture at ease with itself and its self-confirming traditions, it seems Bulgaria is the place to be.