Stolz & Eigensinn

Gerd Kroske, DE 2025, 113 min, German OmeU

In 1994, a pirate radio station from Leipzig portrayed women in mining and industrial companies in the former GDR.

30 years later, Gerd Kroske has the women report and explain, exaggerate and categorize in a simple and touching split-screen montage that juxtaposes the present with the past. The memories of a mountain woman, a machinist, a chemist and a train driver, among others, are interwoven into a discrepant collective narrative of the realities of life in the GDR and the post-reunification period that resists any generalization. Whether as a swan song to coal mining, as an appreciation of hard industrial work, as an observation of a milieu, as a kaleidoscopic portrayal of female biographies or as a provocative, alternative historiography. We should listen to them.