In the Ruhr Region
The entire Filmkritik community dutifully sought to break the silence surrounding the (film) history of the German workers' movement. Nestler, however, had been exiled from the FRG, and Röster från Ruhr, a mournful documentary about the remnants of the Ruhr region's working culture and the memories of the anti-fascist workers, was produced by Swedish television.
In a remorseful text, Enno Patalas, one of Filmkritik’s founders, celebrated Nestler's film as an invaluable repayment of a whole generation's debt, calling it “a panorama of defeat and failure."
Röster från Ruhr is one of the most revolting slices of German reality that I have seen on screen. The reality of the Rhein-Ruhr, the reality of German communism, the reality of the filmmaker Nestler, who we all drove out of the country – German television, which took the possibility to work away from him, the board of trustees that refused to give him money, the critics, who devoted a few anxiously benevolent sentences to his work at best. (Enno Patalas)
Peter Nestler (b.1937) is one of the most singular and important filmmakers to emerge in postwar Germany. In the early 1960s Nestler made a series of poetic films about the changing realities in rural and industrial areas and about the working class communities, mostly in Germany, but also in the UK, where he filmed A Working Men's Club in Sheffield (1965). In the same year he directed From Greece (1965), on the rise of and struggle against fascism followed by the unsparing and exigent In the Ruhr Area (1967). Opposition to his political views and film aesthetics led Nestler to Sweden, where he worked mostly for television. Since the 1970s, Nestler has directed an extraordinary body of work further expanding the form and themes of his first films, including history, the working class, anti-fascism, the history of labour and production, and immigration. In the past 20 years, Nestler's films have continued to focus on change, remembrance and preservation, as exemplified by The North Calotte (1991), a remarkable travelogue tracing the harmful effects of industrialisation on the Sami communities and the landscape of Northern Europe.
(Source: https://dafilms.com/)
