Similar to the recent Romanian New Wave, with An Episode In The Life Of An Iron Picker Bosnian director Danis Tanovic (No Man's Land) presents a stripped back drama on 'real life' in his country's less affluent rural areas.
To make ends meets middle-aged Nacif locates abandoned cars and takes to them with a hatchet, which he then sells on for a meagre amount. Routine has it that he goes for a drink with the earnings before turning for home where wife Senada cooks a local dish, showing their two daughters how it’s done. Nacif eats the dinner and plays with the girls. What begins as a typical episode in his life soon turns to anything but when the pregnant Senada suffers pains and experiences bleeding. The hospital won't operate as she's not insured and the cost of the surgery is far beyond what Nacif can afford. He does what he can – he scours for more metal...
It's the kind of title The Fast Show would get a season’s worth of gags out of. This is bleak cinema. The family's scanty holdings and grim surroundings are underlined in every scene. The telly has a bad reception. The car doesn't start. The electricity is cut off. It's the dead of winter. The misery is unescapable. But not for us: we, tourists in all this, watch from a safe distance and marvel at their stoicism in the face of the unrelenting hardship.
Tanovic wants it both ways. He wants...Iron Picker to be both cinema verite and a straight up drama. In the minimalist approach there are long passages of inactivity as we follow Nacif and Senada (amateurs playing themselves) as they go about their day; the kids break the fourth wall, gazing with childlike wonder at the camera; and one scene sees a passing ladder strike the camera. This is happening, this is real, the film says. But then there is the very structured narrative – Nacif and his family are very much in a plot with a clear beginning, middle and end. Even at a trim seventy-four minutes, however, the plot feels stretched.
That aside, we are pulled into the situation and the couple’s trips to the hospital to beg for help, become engrossing.