It's a Free World

At the begining of the film, Angie, a thirty year old woman, is working for a recruitment agency. She is fired because she refuses her boss’s sexual advances. So, she decides to create her own temporary work agency. However with her friend Rose, she is so desperate to make as much money as possible and to pay back the money she owes, she decides to break the law, not to pay taxes and not to have a licence. She meets professionals who offer casual work to her employees paid on an hourly basis. When her business starts, she refuses to employ workers who don’t have English papers. Later she wants to help an Iranian family who are political refugees in the UK. After a conversation with a business director, she realizes that hiring political refugees who don’t have papers could make her earn a lot of money and very quickly. So she becomes greedier and greedier throughout the film : for example she decides to rent rooms to her workers with the idea of putting as many people as she can in a room ; another example is she calls the immigration authorities to have families thrown off a caravan site so that she can have a place to accommodate her workers. Her greed creates problems for her. One of the professionals for whom she found temporary workers can’t pay her, meaning Angie’s unable to pay her employees. Some of them want to gain revenge hurting her or burgling her flat when she is present. At the end of the film, she has her own office and she goes back to Eastern Europe, this time to The Ukraine, with the aim of recruiting more workers.

After the film, there was a debate with two women who work for the association Amnesty International. This association helps political refugees who arrive in France without papers. The two women explained to us the situation these refugees have to face. For example, they are in a country where they don’t speak the language and they have no right to have papers. They are afraid of being picked up by the police and sent back to their homeland. The two women told us that in many cases, they will be persecuted or killed if they go back there. In African cultures, coming back home is a failure and it means shame. So, many refugees who have a very bad situation in Europe can’t go back to their country. One of the Romanian students wondered why these people continue to come to Europe where they live in misery, can’t find a job and don’t have a life really better than in their countries. The two volontary workers answered that they have the hope to manage to live with dignity in those countries that claim to protect human rights.

I was very surprised by the film because I saw the trailer a few months ago and I minsunderstood it. So, during all the begining of the film, I thougt that Angie wanted to help the refugees giving them a chance to work. But I was disappointed seing that Angie’s character is greedy and ready to do the worst in order to earn money and offer a good life to her son. I wondered what I would do if I was her. And I’m quite sure that I would not have done horrible things like helping people, then denouncing them to the immigration authorities (like she did with Mahmoud’s family). I can’t bear the contempt she has for human values. I think the film denounces the loss of these values and I agree with Ken Loach on this point. However I confess I didn’t like the film beacause I found it very pessimistic for the refugees, like for Angie. She hasn’t any moral values. She’s very determined and makes a lot of effort to earn money, after having been fired many times, but she can’t manage to have what she want. At the end the refugees who were cheated manage to take back all the money she owed them. There is some justice in this but on the other hand this lesson doesn’t teach her anything and she continues to look for workers in Eastern Europe (this time outside the European Union) and to be totally unprincipled.