A prominent Czech journalist leaves her family and joins the “cheap labour force” in Western Europe. Undercover, she works at an asparagus farm in Germany, tries her hand as a maid at a hotel in Ireland, and cares forthe elderly in France. She experiences first-hand the struggles of Eastern European low-wage workers whose sacrifice and hard work allow for Western society’s comfort. What is the real price that Europe pays for exploiting its citizens? What do the lives of economic migrants who have been forced to leave their children and elderly parents look like? And why are privileged Europeans looking the other way?
Content warning: coarse language
Apolena Rychlíková is a Czech documentary filmmaker, writer, and journalist. She graduated from the department of documentary filmmaking at FAMU (Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague), where she currently teaches. Until 2023, she worked at the online daily Alarm, now Rychlíková is a regular contributor to many Czech media and a commentator for the public broadcaster Czech Radio Plus. She has won many awards for her journalistic work and was also the first Czech to be nominated for the prestigious European Journalism Award in the opinion journalism category. In 2024, she became co-editor-in-chief of the Page404 media project. In her film work, she deals with socially critical documentaries. Her film Hranice práce (The Boundaries of Work) won the award for the Best Czech documentary film of 2017 at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, where it also won the Audience Award. It also won the Czech Film Critics‘ Award Mimo Kino. She is also the co-author of several books.
