Response to Dirty Pretty Things

Response to Dirty Pretty Things Stephen Frear’s 2002 film, Dirty Pretty Things, follows the struggles of various immigrants united by a single London hotel run by corrupt management that uses the immigrant employees’ fear and vulnerable status to force them to agree to sell their kidneys to sell on the black market in exchange for work and passports. The main focus is a Nigerian doctor, Okwe, who comes illegally to the U.K. after being wrongly accused of his wife’s murder in his home country. There, he works days as a cab driver (sometimes helping his fellow drivers with medical problems) and nights as a concierge at the hotel. He experiences extensive hardships as he tries to keep his identity secret and battle his own morals in regard to the mistreatment of his coworkers at the hotel and the organ trade while also running from authorities. Okwe’s find out about the organ trade through an extremely harsh, almost mob­style message. After a prostitute who frequents the hotel alerts him of a problem with a certain room, he searches the room to discover a blockage in the toilet ­ a human heart. Alarmed, he confronts the manager, Señor Juan (sometimes referred to as “Sneaky”), who already knows he will keep his mouth shut on the count of his illegal status. This theme of authority figures abusing immigrants’ statuses to further their own means and keep them under their thumb recurs throughout the movie.
We see this with Juan when he attempts to control Okwe by using information about his life against him, as well as when he coerces Senay to have sex with him in exchange for a passport; when
Senay’s boss at the sweatshop sexually assaults her; and when the immigration officials come to terrorize Senay both in her home and her place of work (ultimately forcing her to leave the hotel

job.) Most immigrants in the movie seem to be mistreated in one form or another, often belittle or treated as less­than­human. Power