A true epic on the most unlikely of subjects - industrial relations or at least the rights of workers. There is definitely a touch of Miguel Gomes and his "Arabian Nights" trilogy about Pedro Pinho's glorious film about a group of factory workers doing what they can to save their factory and their jobs and if you think this is going to dry, dull and at three hours much too long, forget it. With his huge cast, almost all non-professionals, Pinho explores every aspect of their lives as well as opening up his film to look at, not just the state of the Portuguese economy but what he sees as the death of capitalism, using a number of cinematic styles so when the moment comes when the workers burst into a song and dance routine, it doesn't feel out of place. This is a funny, moving and really rather over-whelming film as good as anything you will see this year.

Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Pinho's THE NOTHING FACTORY takes home the FIPRESCI Prize in Cannes, with the jury's verdict as follows: "An evocative activist film that blows the boundaries between reality, fiction, theater and sociological discourse leading to an unsettling and provocative cinematic experience." but, it is an overstatement, because there is nothing unsettling and provocative in this meandering docu-drama, a hodgepodge of didactic, verbose theoretical discussions and workaday miserabilism perpetuating around a cohort of blue-collar workers who are saddled with a massive layoff.

Most courageously, the film offers its audience a fine-tooth combing of the downside of capitalism, and hammers home the inevitability of its failing which is behind the lift-manufacturing factory's dodgy maneuver, smuggling machines out in the night, so they can start anew in other places while ditching the current one with their labor surplus. But it suffers from being a typical talk-the- talk endeavor which to this reviewer's lights, is flogging a dead horse.

After negotiating with the shysters hired by the factory owner reaches a standstill, summarily, the workers are left with a half-empty factory and they decide to operate the business on their own despite that no one is equipped with the know-how of management. Anticlimactically, a seemingly propitious order from Argentina doesn't necessarily elicit the hardship-defying mettle which the story-line half-heartedly suggests, apart from an out-of-nowhere musical sequence, whose feigned elation comes a bit too late to dispel the dreadful tenor holding its stranglehold on this nearly 3-hour long realism-evoking overreach er.

Character-arc straggles unsystematic-ally, and what Pinho and his team actually excel is the atmospheric construct: a disconsolate Lisbon colored with invariably somber hue refracts Pinho's own personalistic rumination of the city and his compassion to his beleaguered subjects might not be immediately felt, because self-consciously he knows he is trying to tackle with something much bigger, but to little avail (it is not that a solution is a requisite, but Pinho's scattershot pieces simply do not cohere as a narrative feature). Just like the contrived materialization of a bevy of ostriches loping in the wilderness during the film's middle passage, he intends to speak for those ostracized, marginalized, underprivileged, but visionary illumination is in dire paucity.