Mike B It's not often one sees a film on migrant workers in England from Eastern Europe. These workers are exploited as in underpaid or not paid. The film has a gritty and convincing performance from the lead actress (Kierston Wareing).However there is a lack of logic and continuity in the movie. There are too many sub-plots that go nowhere and are distractive. She has an on and off again romance with a Polish worker which does not really add anything to the plot. She helps a family from Iran for a day and they conveniently disappear. The scenes with her son – who is being cared for by her parents – are more tangible.At the end of the movie she is physically assaulted by workers who are demanding to be paid. They take her money and threaten to kidnap her son. The very next scene abruptly takes us to the Ukraine where she is continuing to recruit. Then the movie ends!!

Howard Schumann Winner of the award for Best Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival, It's a Free World, the seventh collaboration between director Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty, is a compelling look at the recruitment and exploitation of European undocumented workers, a subject touched upon recently in Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things. As in many of Loach's earlier films, It's a Free World has a strong feeling for those who live on the margins in a society that does not care and, uncharacteristically for Loach, is surprisingly even-handed, showing the viewpoint of both the victim and the victimizer.The film begins in Poland as a group of recruits gather around the CoreForce Recruitment Agency, willing to pay money for the right to work in the U.K. Given temporary visas, they manage to land jobs in construction, factory work, or farm labor at minimum wage without any trace of benefits or job security. When Angie (Kierston Wareing), a thirty-three year-old working class recruiter from London is fired for complaining about sexual harassment on the job, she joins with her roommate Rose (Juliet Ellis) in building her own agency in the U.K., matching immigrants from Eastern Europe with employers in London. Riding around on her motorbike, she interviews prospective employers and locates temporary shelters for her workers who must pay extra for the housing.At the outset, conscious of the law and of her integrity, Angie establishes the rule that she will not provide employment to undocumented workers. Much to Rose's chagrin, Angie soon bends these rules and slowly begins to lose her moral compass, joining the competition in the recruiting and exploiting of illegal immigrants. Though she shows compassion in supporting an Iranian refugee who is desperately looking for work, she later calls the Immigration Department to arrest illegal workers who are living in housing provided by a competitor. Angie's change may be prompted by the reminder of her need to provide for her eleven-year-old son Jamie (Joe Siffleet) who has been living with her parents and has developed a proclivity to break other students' jaws at school.Her father Geoff (Colin Caughlin) visits and tries to be encouraging about her new business but his stance is simple: immigrants have brought their troubles onto themselves and should not take up any of our concerns. When Angie justifies her actions by saying that if the workers didn't want the jobs, they wouldn't show up, it is reminiscent of politicians who blame the media for their moral and spiritual retreats. The issues crystallize when a friendly construction foreman is ripped off and Angie is unable to pay her workers, leading to a physical assaulted and a threat against Jamie by the angry workers.In her first feature film performance, Kierston Wareing shows great promise as the blonde, leather-jacketed, motorcycle-riding entrepreneur who is willing to deal with the sleazier aspects of the business. With the knowledge that decades of public policy have led to this situation, however, Loach does not single her out as the only culprit, simply one who is unable to look beyond a value system that can only see what is in their immediate material self interest. Though It's a Free World is far less impactful than some of the earlier Loach-Laverty collaborations, it is a strong film that does not pull its punches and did not deserve a one-day U.K. opening and a direct-to-DVD treatment.

stensson There's a new exploited class in the Western world. The illegal immigrants. Since they've got no papers, they will take any work, any wage, any risks. And there are people who are just too eager to help them.The main person here is fired from a recruiting agency. She starts her own and also starts to exploit people like she's been exploited. The free world means almost slavery, since people without papers have no rights. But those who provide companies with such labour force can easily become the victims in this perverted order.Another Ken Loach movie which put the unpleasant questions. And gives the unpleasant answers.

Harry T. Yung After winning a well deserved Cannes Palm D'Or with "The wind that shakes the barley" (2006) that meet head-on the issue of the political issue of the IRA, auteur Ken Loach went on to tackle the social issue of illegal immigrants workers in London, with "It's a free world". While Loach, even when showing a degree of sympathy, always maintains an overriding objectivity, the IRA issue is one that is emotionally dramatic. "It's a free world", however, is presented with such detachment that it at times looks like a documentary, although it is by no means without its dramatic moments.This gritty tale, with profoundly disturbing realism, is told through the protagonist Angie, superbly portrayed by Kierston Wareing (who, incidentally, bears a certain resemblance to Angie Dickenson, to those who have watched movies long enough to remember her). A single mother of a sixth-grader, Angie loses her job and ventures out on her own, teaming up with roommate Rose to form an agency that arranges work for immigrant workers, often on a daily basis. The scene alternates between her personal life and business undertaking. In the former case, we see the continuing struggle to carry out a mother's responsibility to the eleven-year-old son who is staying with her parents on a temporary basis. There is also a very brief depiction of a romance with a very nice man, a worker in her labour force supply. It is the latter, however, that is the focus of the movie.With perfect division of work, Rose does all the administrative work while Angie, riding her bike in an image almost as cool as Arnold Schwarzenegger (you know which movies), goes around hangouts of immigrate workers to collect her work force. With repeated scenes, many of us in the uninformed audience are drawn into this realistically depicted world of daily logistic of assembling immigrant workers of all shape and size, roll calls and dispatching them to colour-coded trucks to send them off to various factories. Things seem to go fairly well until Angie (with a very reluctantly Rose) is lured into the lucrative business of using illegal immigrants.Gradually, the movie also turns into a taxing test of the audiences' scruples. Without passing judgment, Director Loach presents the audience with meticulous details for them to form theirs. We see how at the outset, Angie seems very sympathetic to the workers, to the extents that a young chap gives her a small gift to thank her for finding him such a good job. We see how she provides temporary accommodation at their place (with mild objections from Rose) to an Iranian family of four in a state of financial desperation. On the other hand, there is an ominous undercurrent of troubles of delayed wage payments by irresponsible employers. Initially, while these cheated workers pressure Angie for their wages, it looks as if she is as much as victim as they are. Gradually, however, she begins to change, becoming an exploiter herself, unscrupulous to a point when Rose can no longer live with her own conscience and withdraws from the partnership. Physical violence and threats only serve to harden Angie. In the last, open-ended, scene we see her in a recruiting trip to Ukraine. Whether she will eventually get into serious trouble is no longer important. The pressing question, as the audience leaves the cinema, is what kind of a woman is Angie. There would undoubtedly be a wide spectrum of views, from sympathy to denunciation. But perhaps even that is not important. Maybe Angie is only a case which Loach employs to educate the audience of a cruel reality.