Mi, 9.11. / 17:30
Schichtwechsel / Change of Shift
Berufsporträts sind ein beliebtes Genre – im Kinderfernsehen wie im Dokumentarfilm. Immer wieder gern werden beispielsweise Pathologen oder Präparatoren porträtiert. Die Filme dieses Programms beobachten weniger Reißerisches und dafür in spektakulären Bildern. Ob beim Koch im Chinarestaurant oder bei den Arbeitern in einer alten Fabrik – fast immer steht die körperliche Arbeit im Mittelpunkt. Die Bildschirmarbeiter von heute staunen mal neidisch, mal mitleidig.

Portraits of a profession are a popular genre – in children’s television and in documentary filmmaking. Pathologists and taxidermists are a favoured subject. The films of this programme are less concerned with such lurid activities but nonetheless offer spectacular images. Whether with a chef in a Chinese restaurant or with the workers in an old factory – the focus is almost always on physical labour. Today’s desk worker with his computer can only be astounded – sometimes with envy other times with empathy.



De Schel (The Bell)
Ivanka Bakker
Niederlande 2004, 9:19 Min.
Deutsche Premiere
ivanka_bakker@yahoo.co.uk

Der Film porträtiert die Arbeit einer Brückenwärterin in Amsterdam. Ihr Job ist mehr als nur eine Arbeit. Denn nachdem sie die Glocke geläutet hat, heben sich die Arme ihrer Brücke und die hektische Eile der Großstadt wird unterbrochen. Für einen kurzen Moment steht die Stadt still, ein Schiff passiert. Dann senkt sich die Brücke und alles ist wieder beim alten.

A female guard operates the crossing of haste and quietness of the city, the bridge. Quietness which shifts into haste, and shift back to quietness again. With the bridge and the guard being the central point.
The main character is looking for the stillness of the water, as a contrast to the haste of the city. In this contrast she finds the perfect balance.
Her focus is on the water, nevertheless, she finds herself in the turmoil of the city. She sees the approaching ships and rings the bell.
The traffic suddenly stops when the barrier ascends. For just a short while the city stands still. She is following the slow movement of the ships and waves it of with a short greeting.
On her signal, the barrier descends, the traffic starts and the city goes back to the normal speed.
For the passer-by this pattern is a reoccurring obstacle, but not for the guard, who notices each change and detail.


Herr Zhu
Bettina Timm
Deutschland 2004, 21 Min.

Ein Chinarestaurant im 18. Bezirk in Wien: Der Koch: Unter Mao zwangsverschickt und zum Arzt angelernt, danach Koch im Shanghai Hilton und dann den Traum vom Leben in Europa zur Wirklichkeit gemacht. Der chinesische Alltag in Wien: Ein Leben zwischen Küche und Bett, kein Ruhetag, kein Kontakt mit der Außenwelt.

A Chinese restaurant in Vienna's 18th district. The chef: deported during Mao's regime and trained as a doctor, then chef in the Shanghai Hilton and finally realizing his dream of a life in Europe. Chinese every day life in Vienna: a life between kitchen and bed, no day off, no contact to the outside world.

Warning, Petroleum Pipeline
Jan van Nuenen
Niederlande 2004, 4:45 Min.

Eine trostlose Wüstenlandschaft verwandelt sich langsam in eine futuristische Industriewelt. Undefinierbare Maschinen verzweigen sich in komplexe Mechanismen, die einen industriellen Soundtrack produzieren, zu dem sie sich rhythmisch bewegen.

The movement of information across the worldwide web is invisible. Bits and bytes slip soundlessly through slender cables, to arrive, in no more than a split second, at the computer for which they are meant, where they can be used again at the click of a mouse. In contrast, the movement of oil is a messy and ponderous affair, which makes huge claims on the landscape and built-up areas. Bulky, rusty pipes traverse the fields, while trucks and tankers toil slowly over roads and oceans, accompanied by the threat of pollution and explosion. Both processes have drastically changed the world, and continue to keep economic and political relations on the alert. With its black-and-white collage-like images, 'Warning Petroleum Pipeline' is reminiscent of art that, in the early twentieth century, was intended to depict the destructive power of the emerging heavy industry. Mysterious machines turn and hammer to a strict rhythm, and seem to be propagating themselves, creating a forest of moving components, sharp-edged plates and heavy cables. The fluent digital animation is a dark vision that not only shows destruction, but also, paradoxically, the uncontrollable creative power by which an industry can bring itself to fruition.


Tweety Lovely Superstar
Emmanuel Gras
Frankreich 2005, 18 Min.
Weltpremiere

NOMINIERUNG: WERKLEITZ-STIPENDIUM

Vier Männer und ein Kind auf dem Dach eines Gebäudes. Ihre Arbeit: es zu zerstören. Ihr Werkzeug: ihre Arme. Die Arbeit dieses Tages ist die Arbeit eines jeden Tages.

Four men and a child on the top of a building. Their work: to destroy it. Their tools: their arms. Their labour of this day is their labour of each day.


Hammer and Flame
Vaughan Pilikian
Großbritannien 2005, 10 Min.

An der nordindischen Küste gibt es einen Ort, an den sich die Schiffe zum Sterben zurückziehen. Ausgemusterte Schiffe aus der ganzen Welt werden hier von Männern und Frauen mit den einfachsten Werkzeugen abgewrackt.

On the coast of northern India is a place where ships come to die. Most of the world’s decommissioned ships are demolished here by men and women using the simplest tools.
A vision of the maritime graveyards on the coast of northern India, where in an unending and dangerous labour the hulls of dead ships are broken down piece by piece using only the simplest of tools.
Notes on the death of a ship
On the coast of Northern India lies a place where ships come to die. Driven into the sand at high tide, these great and mournful behemoths stand revealed as the waves recede like the collapsed monuments of a lost civilisation. Their ghostly towers are demolished by a workforce of men and women, largely from the poorer parts of the subcontinent, using only the simplest of tools. Although the prime harvest is steel, everything is salvaged, from propellors and engines to ship’s manuals and the crew’s crockery. At its height in the mid-nineties, the industry at Alang employed some thirty thousand workers in its one hundred and fifty plots. Although it has suffered from the attacks of environmentalists and the exigencies of global economics, seventy percent of the world’s decommissioned shipping stock still arrives there as scrap, and the shanty town alongside the yards is home to several thousand workers who labour from dawn until nightfall and beyond for a dollar a day. Controversy surrounds Alang, expressed both in India and abroad in rumour, myth, accusation and counter-accusation. Ships are dense shells of toxic material, and while the Western owners and brokers largely evade responsibility for a ship’s disposal once a sale is made, worker welfare and environmental concerns are not of signal importance for buyers in India. Explosions caused by pockets of oil trapped inside derelict tankers have claimed the lives of dozens of workers, and the devastating longterm effects of asbestos inhalation are still being bleakly reckoned up. For the government of Gujarat it is a sensitive matter; they are well aware that most of the media attention Alang has received from the West has become part of the campaign calling for greater regulation of the industry. Shortly before our own overtures, the BBC had been denied permission to film there. Only after long negotiation did we become the first British crew to be allowed access to the yards We had read and seen the reports, but nothing could prepare us for what we found. A mysterious, shattered city rose and fell, its citizens carrying out tasks seemingly without purpose or end yet doing so with an focus and dilligence that belied the almost inconceivable difficulty of pulling apart the gargantuan structures lying on the shore. They worked methodically and silently, perhaps grown tired of competing with the deafening diesel throb of the winches and the blowtorches’ serpent’s hiss. As the landscape shifted around us, at some moments the half-demolished shells took on the appearance of bombed-out tenements, at others the grandeur of ruined temples. Conditions were wretched and the work fraught with danger, but the place had an apocalyptic and savage beauty against which words failed and arguments—however decent or expedient—seemed glib or ineffectual. In response we tried to tune ourselves to the pulse of Alang, to bear witness, to summon up its enigma on screen. Our film is not so much a documentary as a fragment from elsewhere, a brief illumination of a world at the border of what we might care to imagine. On this edge between the land and the sea is a place which we visit in the cinema as we might the banks of the Styx in dreams.


Fabrika (Factory)
Sergei Loznitsa
Russland 2004, 30 Min.

Der Film zeigt einen Tag in einer Fabrik. Er ist in die Teile „Stahl“ und „Gips“ gegliedert. Ist der Mensch Teil der maschinellen Welt oder die Maschine Teil der menschlichen Welt? Das von Menschenhand produzierte Metall versklavt die Menschen und reduziert ihr Leben auf pure Reflexe.

This film depicts one day of an operating fabric.
It consists of two parts: the first one is called Steel, the second – Plaster. This film is about a human being as a part of the machinery world or a machinery world as a part of human world.
Metal produced by people enslaves them and reduce their lives to pure reflexes.
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