More than three quarters of the 650,000 inmates released from prison in the United States every year end up back behind bars within five years. Former drug dealer Coss wants to beat the statistics. After a long prison sentence, he returns to his family on New York’s Lower East Side in 2014, determined to build a legal existence for himself. Together with other former inmates, he opens a gym in his old neighbourhood which is rapidly being gentrified. If a guy like him can master this extreme challenge, can other ex-convicts do the same?
Filmmaker Debra Granik observed Coss’s efforts over a period of eight years. Through her camera, we experience frictions and obstacles, setbacks and successes, and learn what enormous stress it is to succeed against all odds in a racist environment that knows no mercy. Like a Bildungsroman – Granik explicitly refers to the social-realist literature of Charles Dickens –, the film is divided into chapters. The long form enables her to follow several narrative strands and focus on a variety of protagonists. This generates an increasing pull that soon makes us forget the time, lament every failure, and cheer every small victory.

In the 1970s, the free spirits of the Clara Mosch artist group from Karl-Marx-Stadt declared the GDR a happening zone. A poetic film portrait about the power of art.

Scene by scene, a biography is delicately peeled back layer by layer, and German history along with it: National Socialism, GDR, the post-Reunification era. A granddaughter visits her grandfather. The elderly gentleman exercises regularly, has a gym in the house. She explains her project to him – and her film will remain a project in character. It is a permanent probing of how deep, how far she can go with her questions.
He keeps family photos from the Nazi era in a shabby metal box that has obviously not been opened in a long time, including a picture of his older brother in the uniform of the Nazi’s Reich Labour Service. It was not until a few months after the end of the war that great-grandmother took it off the wall, fearing it could be seen by Red Army soldiers. Grandfather revered his brother, who fell on the east front in 1944, admiring his strength and athleticism. He continued this cult of the body in the sports-obsessed GDR. The talks frequently revolve around personal responsibility and moral grey zones, around forgetting and repression. The granddaughter seems to be wondering who she is actually sitting opposite.

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.