“You see, wherever you look, only vanity on earth. What this one builds today, that one tears down tomorrow.” With the famous poem by Andreas Gryphius – from 1637! – begins a documentary about the change in work, observed in the former car cities of Bochum and Detroit. The directors let residents of these cities read lines by the baroque poet, they sound strange to them, but they too have experienced the transience of everything earthly: “It sounds as if he understood it,” comments one. “That sounds like a depression,” another.
How do people deal with it when their livelihood suddenly collapses? How do cities survive when tens of thousands of jobs are lost in one fell swoop? “We Are All Detroit” by Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken, which will be in cinemas from Thursday, draws parallels between the “motor city” of Detroit with its ghost quarters and Bochum, where an “innovation district” with the pithy name of “Mark 51°7” arises. They meet in Detroit urban gardeners and a tailor of “perfect” jeans are watching the opening of a DHL parcel hall in Bochum with 600 precarious jobs. Do such projects replace an entire industry?
The kids with the supposed dream jobs are ultimately just the henchmen of rich companies
Since the pandemic, the question of how we want to (and can) work in the future has become even more urgent. Is the four-day week or the five-hour day coming? Will there finally be more women in boardrooms? What about the right to home office? Will digital leaders lead differently? “We Are All Detroit” looks wistfully to the end of the industrial age, as if working in a steel mill or car factory had always been nice. Former guest workers at Opel were not asked about this.
The Munich Dokfest, which runs until May 22nd, names one of his film series “Brave new work”. It already bears the dystopian quality of many a thought in its title. What does it look like, the brave new world of work that takes the place of the workbench and the assembly line? According to the filmmakers, digitization has not only changed the professional world itself, but also the idea of many people as to what a “good” job can actually be.
Almost as if they were alone: Jamie and Nico having professional amateur sex in “Pornfluencer”, in front of their own camera and that of the filmmaker.
(Photo: Dokfest Munich)
Jamie and Nico seem to have achieved what many dream of: They don’t have to deal with annoying bosses and earn a great income – by posting the sex they have together as a “verified couple” on the Internet. “pornfluencer” by Joscha Bongard shows them at work and as lovers, which is almost the same thing. They start the day with motivating sentences in front of the mirror: “I’m beautiful”, “I deserve to be rich” or “Every woman thinks I’m horny”. This is followed by fitness training, the shooting of little films, their post-processing and posts on social media: Jamie’s sexy but adult Tiktok videos are intended to lure users on Twitter, where the next link leads to paid porn of the two.
“Pornfluencer” leaves the viewer productively perplexed, the film is increasingly disturbing. Jamie says some of her friends couldn’t understand why she was doing porn, which Jamie doesn’t understand: “I’m making so much money, I’m doing so well, I feel free, I’ve got Nico – I can’t do better than that. ” Meanwhile, Nico is sitting next to her with his legs apart (who knows the meaning of the word manspreading wants to see illustrated, can’t find a better example) and is recognizable as her “boss”. Coming from the pickup truck scene, he talked the then 18-year-old virgin Jamie into the sex films, which he says he enjoys more than she does. But Jamie doesn’t seem to mind at all.
Even if the sex business is a niche – influencers, youtubers or gamers are the new dream jobs of many young people. “Girl Gang” by Susanne Regina Meures accompanies Leonie, who as “Leoobalys” has well over a million followers on Tiktok. She is fourteen when the film begins, her father is also her manager, and the life of the whole family soon revolves almost entirely around Leonie’s styling, her appointments, her advertising jobs (in her posts she praises fashion, cosmetics or fast food) and their performances in front of screaming youths. Later the family has its own online shop.
“Dragon Women” tells about the difficulties of being a top manager and mother
Self-exploitation and self-realization are one in this “beautiful” new world of work. He is living his daughter’s dream, says the father, but you can also see – young people, please read along! – that Leonie is under increasing pressure, she hardly has any “real” girlfriends and sometimes gets very, very nasty hate comments. It is well known how destructive social media can become. And a Leonie fan also demonstrates it: Melanie, whose unrequited “love” for her Tiktok idol has determined her thinking and all of her free time for years.
Leonie and Jamie are two faces of digital capitalism, which is not only disturbed by product placement and self-marketing by influencers. It is mentioned that the kids with the supposed dream jobs are only henchmen of companies worth billions. In addition, the video films convey a picture of permanent pressure to perform and self-optimization, which cannot easily be combined with interest groups or communities of solidarity (such as trade unions). Does anyone who only looks at their smartphone as if they were in a mirror have larger connections in mind? “Girl Gang” and “Pornfluencer” are pessimistic.
Leonie as “Leoobalys” has well over a million followers on Tiktok, the documentary “Girl Gang” accompanies her.
(Photo: Dokfest Munich)
That women’s networks (and a women’s quota!) could be a good idea is conveyed “Dragon Women” by Frédérique de Montblanc, who portrays five women in leadership positions in finance. The filmmaker comes astonishingly close to the managers: they talk about men’s networks and men’s codes in and with which they have to act. About the difficulty (for some: impossibility) of being a top manager and mother, about a life that is almost eaten up by work. These are impressive encounters with fascinating women – but you don’t really learn anything new. And that’s exactly the bad thing about it, that everyone knows where the mistakes are and yet little progress is made.
Even more fundamental questions dare “The Happy Worker” by John Webster. He explores why so many employees suffer from stress or even burnout, but his witty critique of capitalism doesn’t get him very far intellectually. Alexander Riedels is more fruitful “After work”, which accompanies people who are about to retire. How much meaning does a shift life in a steel mill make? Driving a bus, working as a teacher, a series actress or in the family fishing business? And what can fill the gap after the end of gainful employment? Economic concepts cannot be distilled from Riedel’s observations. But they shed a different light on concepts such as the four-day week or the five-hour day, opening up – where work is currently changing so radically – a field for positive utopias: after work as we know it, a lot could still come.
“We Are All Detroit” will be in cinemas from May 12, 2022, all other films can be seen at the Munich Dokfest: until May 15 in the festival cinemas, until May 22 throughout Germany in the online program.