Industriance™: LOSERS AND WINNERS
An extraordinary feature-length documentary about 400 Chinese workers who break down a massive German industrial plant and ship it back to their homeland, leaving Germany's engineers behind.

WATCH THE TRAILER
SAT., JUNE 23, 2007
8:30 - Live Music by Darla Rose (details)
9:00 - Movies Begin

On the roof of The Old American Can Factory
CLICK for DIRECTIONS
232 Third Street @ Third Avenue
Gowanus, Brooklyn (Between Carroll gardens and Park Slope)
In the event of rain the show is indoors at the same location.
Tickets -$8 at the door or $5 online HERE with code: RFJUNE
Presented in partnership with - IFC.com, New York magazine &
XØ Projects, Inc

LOSERS AND WINNERS
(Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken | Germany | 96 min)

In December 2000, Germany's famous “heartbeat of steel,” went silent. The conveyor belts came to a standstill, the cooling towers were emptied. After only eight years in operation, the ultramodern coal distillation plant at Kaiserstuh—built at a cost of nearly 1 billion dollars—was shut down. The price of the materials being produced by the plant had dropped so low that the high cost of employing hundreds of skilled engineers to run the plant made it unprofitable to continue to produce coke (distilled fuel made from coal) in Germany.

But in the spring of 2003, hundreds of Chinese workers arrived at the dormant factory. They set up a makeshift Chinese outpost in the little town of Dortmund and swiftly modified the factory grounds, constructed community rooms, designed industrial-size kitchens with giant woks, and brought in bunk beds and satellite dishes so they could watch TV shows from home. Most of all, they began to work—dynamically, efficiently, and…unsafely.

The booming Chinese economy created a massive demand for fuel and steel, and a Chinese entrepreneur purchased the factory with the intention of shipping it back to China and selling it to a state-run steel company. The Chinese acquired the factory in its entirety—from the blueprints, to the smoke stacks, to the very last nuts and bolts—and they will deliver every piece back to China and reconstruct the plant there. The jobs in Germany? They are gone, likely never to return.

For one and a half years, filmmakers Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken watched as the gigantic site was dismantled, documenting the stories accompanying its disappearance and how the coke workers in the industrial Ruhr Region experienced the arrival and working methods of the Chinese. They capture the Germans' feelings as they watch the plant they built disappear, and they show us the strain and conflicts the Chinese workers face during their 80-hour work weeks, far away from home and family, caught between euphoria and doubts about their future.

Two worlds collide. But who is ultimately the winner and who the loser when jobs leave their country of origin and a whole region of Germany experiences first-hand the impact of the phenomenon of globalization?

Music:

Darla Rose is a young, up-and-coming New York singer songwriter.
She spins sugary sweet folk/pop songs perched eloquently behind her
autoharp, backed by musicians Calpin Hoffman-Williamson and David Luke Taylor an acoustic guitar.