Lee Anne Schmitt’s first feature-length essay tours through California’s former company towns, which originally sprung up to house those working in the state’s primary industries and later slipped into dereliction or oblivion with the arrival of globalisation. Ghostly shots of decaying homes and dilapidated facilities rub up against vistas of verdant nature and open horizons, just as tales of prejudice and exploitation intermingle with thwarted utopian dreams. Augmenting her own ravishing 16mm footage with archive material, historical photographs and contemporary radio soundbites, Schmitt scours this hybrid landscape like a beachcomber for all the ideological traces it holds, whereby no story nor detail is too small to be excavated.

It’s hard to imagine a more thorough, trenchant and disturbingly compelling account of how the US arrived at its current state than Lee Anne Schmitt’s formidable fourth feature. Her starting point is personal: Her father worked for infamous American chemical company the Olin Corporation, the dolls he used to send her from his business trips forming one of the film’s leitmotifs. While wreaking environmental havoc across the nation, Olin also birthed its own foundation, whose deep pockets helped the racist, classist neoconservative movement gain the necessary traction. Sites of significance, archive material, intertitle quotes, shots of salient literature and snatches of domesticity: the building blocks of a comprehensive political takedown.

Is that a belly or a cell that is in visible turmoil? In any case, in Angel Wu’s film the capitalist hamster wheel is a living organism – though it is not quite clear whether we live in it or it in us. When a young factory worker makes a wooden fetish, prays to it, and then eats it, he is physically and visibly consumed with ambition and work mania. Without further ado, the people around the fire turn into a column of factory workers with a number-crunching management, the free-roaming zebra is put into a cage that is quickly shipped off as a container. But Wu does not just stage this development as a simple series of recognisable capitalism markers but also retains the cryptic, haptic quality of her magnificent mixed media reflection on the content level.
Is the fetish an anvil that symbolises human malleability? Does the worker long for something else? Are the delicately drawn insights into the interior of the machine visions of hell or simply an Anthropocene in its final stage? Based on the physical formula “work equals force times distance,” Wu not only combines 2D animation, photography, collage, and drawing – as well as Taiwanese music featuring some unsavoury retching. Rather, she condenses reflections on working life in (Asian) societies and our imprisonment within it.

“Which side are you on?” sings Florence Reece, an icon of the miners’ movement in Harlan County, Kentucky, with a brittle voice into the microphone at a union rally. Barbara Kopple’s long-term observation of the 1973 Brookside strike might even be called a music film. Because aside from Reece’s classic strike anthem, song and speech, folklore and politics, rhythms of speaking and editing are combined throughout: a successful attempt at partisanship that appeals to all the senses, where slogans are absent – or put into song. “Harlan County, USA” was presented in a special screening at the Leipzig Dokumentarfilmwoche in autumn 1977, its fame having preceded it: It had already won the Oscar for Best Documentary Film in April of that year.

In 1965, the longest farm workers’ strike in US-American history unrolled in Delano, California. Led by Cesar Chavez, the as yet unorganised Mexican seasonal labourers fought successfully for better working conditions and the right to found a union of their own, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). “¡Huelga!” is the partisan portrait of an emerging solidarity group that not only stood up against the unregulated capitalism in the agricultural sector but also declared war on the racism of the white landowners. In addition to depicting the mechanisms of the strike, the mobile camera also makes a point of documenting the degrading living conditions of the people who kept one of the most powerful industries in the country going.

The landscape presented by Randa Maroufi in the final part of her trilogy about Moroccan cities seems unreal. This is Jerada, where a coal mine once attracted numerous workers to the region. And even though the mine closed in 2001, mining is still going on – secretly and under dangerous conditions. Maroufi interweaves Super8 images of the miners and their families with 3D scans of the area. But the most impressive parts are her re-stagings of the processes and threats featuring the workers of Jerada themselves: In long shots, taken both above and below ground, hard work becomes visible: physical, persistent, carried out with the simplest of tools. Hands with shovels fill coal sacks and load them onto a converted motorbike, a few metres below men crawl through narrow shafts that can collapse any moment. In conjunction with a sophisticated sound backdrop, “L’mina” evokes an almost surreal place. At the same time, documentary images remind us that this mining area is not a walk-in diorama but reality. As Maroufi emphatically puts it in her dedication at the end: “For those who live in the shadows to enlighten us.”

Set to high-contrast series of images in black and white that sometimes come to a standstill, the female first-person narrator recites an emphatic speech about her political awakening: her development from an exploited day-worker to a guerrillera fighting against the political and economic influence of the USA on Latin American states, in this case the globally active United Fruit Company and its dominance in Guatemala. “My Country Occupied” is a film in search of a political form, oscillating between rapidly edited agitprop in the spirit of Latin-American Third Cinema, polemically used found footage and rather catchy, folkloristic-looking passages about the country and its people.

Rosa lived and worked in Germany for more than three decades and used her hard-earned money to build a house at home, in southern Italy. It was originally intended as security for the whole family, but they stayed in Germany when Rosa moved there in the late 1990s. Ever since her husband died, she has been running a two-floor bed and breakfast there on her own which has seen better days. Her daily routines are marked by hardship and disappointment: The drudgery is not getting easier with age, cleaners are hard to find, the region is in decline. Rosa is in a bad mood, complains silently, and argues loudly with her brother who lives next door. The family are far away and connections are often poor. Only her regular trips to the nearby sea, which is beautiful even in winter, make her happy. What to do with a legacy that nobody wants?
“Nonna” is a tribute to his grandmother by her filmmaker grandson that captures people, places and times with precision and subtle humour, portraying a life journey between two homelands that did not work out as imagined.

The old shots smell like phenol and brown coal dust. In the spring of 1991, two documentary filmmakers travelled through the former energy triangle of the GDR, centred around the towns of Spremberg, Hoyerswerda and Schwarze Pumpe. In the midst of despair and resignation, they demanded analyses. Those who faced layoffs answered: “When there’s no work, there’s no work.” Or more simply: “Bang, out, gone, that’s it.” Thirty years later, Martin Gressmann and the documentarists from 1991 are not done yet with the fractures and open wounds of the industry liquidations right after reunification.
The comparison between the history – full of murky air and people who hide from the camera – and the apparently appeased present does not lend itself to make-overs; the landscapes that followed brown coal mining are not pretty yet, the river Spree is only halfway cleaned-up, the power plant is still one of the main CO2 emitters in Europe. You often have to look twice to understand that an important leap in time was made in the images. The dirt and the energy of the past keep coming back, and Lusatia continues to “serve and work” in the “subconscious of the distant capital”. Idiosyncratic texts and bold documentary manoeuvres generate an ambivalent mix of surfaces and deep strata, erosion and repair of an industrial landscape.

In August 1975, 80,000 coal miners in the Appalachians laid down tools for several weeks in a so-called wildcat strike, that is, a labour dispute organised without unions. They went on strike for the right to strike in the first place, which until then had been de facto taken from them by dubious contracts. The film team is in the thick of the dynamic events, filming spontaneous and prepared speeches, interviewing strikers, recording strike songs by left-wing folk musicians who perform in the crowd. A film about speech and speechlessness, solidarity and social injustice.