Up the Danube
Nestler’s films generally start off with a quite specific, sometimes brief focus that evolves from a micro gesture into something globally important. The Uppför Donau begins with a young boy in an oral exam recounting the Battle of Mohács. Nestler departs from a recollection controlled by the (school) authorities and moves along the Danube, from the Black Sea through Mohács and Budapest, and up to the Black Forest, in order to narrate, via children, workers, and works of art, the ideas and atrocities of Central Europe. Riverside industry, a central focus for Nestler, represents the subjugation of nature and even modern civilization itself.
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/)
