‘Working Worlds’ was a major strand at this year’s Crossing Europe Film Festival in Linz, showcasing documentaries on labour-related themes. Neil Young spoke to the section’s co-founder Dominik Kamalzadeh, film critic for Vienna’s leading left-of-centre broadsheet, Der Standard
NY: How did Working Worlds start?
DK: In the beginning, it was the idea of two of my friends – Michael Loebenstein and Dieter Pichler – and myself. We founded the organisation Kinoreal with the idea of bringing documentaries back into cinemas. As we were particularly interested in topical work-related issues, we proposed this idea to Christine Dollhofer for the first edition of her festival, Crossing Europe. At first, we thought of presenting newer and older films, perhaps even fictional features. However, after a little research, it was clear that there are enough documentaries made in Europe each year to fill the kind of programme we wanted to put on.
NY: Looking back at the various editions of Working Worlds, which films in particular
are you pleased to have programmed?
DK: I like the ones which are formally inventive. Gerhard Friedl’s Did Wolff von Amerongen Commit Bankruptcy Offences? is one of my favourites, because of its fundamental scepticism about the representation of a certain history of economics. This is a crucial point in many programmes: the limits of documentaries that focus on work or structures of work which are vanishing.
NY: How important are cinema-documentaries to an understanding of the current economic turmoil?
DK: I don’t think cinema can really provide answers to the turmoil. But it is able to show certain contexts – structural, existential – that help to make very abstract processes more tangible. Claire Denis once said that you cannot fight the stock exchange because it’s too abstract. I don’t agree totally with that. I think one has to imagine new ways of mapping an economic world – and every year there seem to be one or two films which try out something new.
NY: Are there any particular film-makers in Europe who are consistently addressing the kind of economic and social issues raised by Working Worlds?
DK: Harun Farocki did a lot of his films on work and capitalist methodology. The German documentarian Thomas Heise’s work is another consistent example. But the majority seem to switch after one or two films to other subjects.
NY: How do you see Working Worlds developing?
DK: What would be extremely interesting is an in-depth retrospective which could focus on historic examples – going back to things like [Georges Franju’s abattoir classic] The Blood of the Beasts. We always try to keep refocusing a bit. Next year we’re thinking about a programme which looks at Europe as a kind of heaven, as seen from an exterior perspective – with films from places such as North Africa. That is a fascinating new angle. l
A pair of fine new documentaries from Germany proved the highlights of the fifth Working Worlds survey, each looking towards the east for inspiration. In the case of Hans-Christian Schmid’s The Wondrous World of Laundry, this was a case of peeking into Poland – the town of Widuchowa, to be precise, location of the German-owned laundry which services most of Berlin’s four-star hotels.
Rather than sheets and machinery, Schmid’s focus is on the women – and they are nearly all women – who work at the facility, going behind the closed doors of their homes and allowing them to tell their own stories. Schmid’s excellent drama, Requiem, showed how small-town family pressures can, under certain circumstances, prove suffocating and repressive. Here the family is shown as an invaluable support to the workers.
The downside is that the women’s domestic responsibilities eat into time that might otherwise be dedicated to trade union activities – as we see during a meeting of the plant’s Solidarity representatives, where there’s only a single female present. An implicit indictment of Poland’s haphazard recent governments, the documentary is also an examination of the country’s possible futures – at a crucial historical moment when, thanks to the enlargement of the Schengen area, and as the residents wryly note, “the border is coming to us”.
The people of Widuchowa have their problems, but housing is some way down the list. This is in direct contrast to the St Petersburg residents we meet in Christiane Buchner’s cumbersomely-titled but pleasingly acerbic Perestroika – ReConstruction Of A Flat. In the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet Union, countless city-centre apartments were divided into “communal flats”, with a family in each fairly spacious room and shared kitchen and bathroom facilities. Now most of these flats are being re-combined into single units of property and flogged on the real-estate market. This is leading to all manner of nightmarish bureaucratic complexities and protracted financial wrangling as each set of residents seeks to obtain maximum advantage in terms of money and even more valuable floor-space.
As an indictment of governmental misrule and neglect, Perestroika is arguably even grimmer and darker than The Wondrous World of Laundry, but Buchner’s light touch and eye and ear for quirky details ensure that the bitter medicine goes down surprisingly easily. While primarily a glimpse into
the methods employed at a small-time Russian estate agency, the film is also an entertaining and informative snapshot of the country as a whole as it discovers the decidedly mixed blessings of unreconstructed capitalism.
