Foreigners Out! Schlingensief's Container

Austria, the year 2000. The far right FPÖ, led by Jörg Haider, has entered the government, the first time such a party has taken part in the running of the state since the Second World War. In June the German director Christoph Schlingensief sets up a street action against it: he places a container in the tourist centre of Vienna, right beside the opera house. Twelve asylum seekers live inside it, watched constantly by cameras, and passers by can look in on them. The action was called foreigners out; people voting online eliminated one of them each day, and the one eliminated was to be removed from the country. The format points directly at the surveillance programmes of the period, at Big Brother above all. The documentary records that week and the argument that broke out around it. The action was counted as art and as provocation at once; its method was heavily argued over then and since. Paul Poet’s ninety minute Austrian documentary was completed in 2002.