Documentary: “We were buddies”: Job gone, now what?

While the energy transition is progressing haltingly and far too slowly, those whose jobs are related to mining are naturally particularly affected by the changes in industrialization in this country. Now the decline of this industry is by no means a new development, but even in 2023 mines will still close and employees will lose their jobs, which they have often held for decades.

This means that the mostly older (mainly) men are thrown into a modern working society in which their skills are no longer needed and in which traditional social structures that provided long-term jobs are disappearing. How these people experience these extreme upheavals and how they deal with them is documented using a few examples in the film “We were buddies,” which can be seen in cinemas from this Thursday.

Despite its length, the film is quite informative, because what we are shown up close is nothing less than the capitalist petty-bourgeois and wage-earning hell – and the people who (have to) move in it. First we accompany Wolfgang Herrmann (Locke) and Marco Edelmann (Langer), two long-time friends, employees of a mining company, who still really work underground. We see them with black faces and finally in the shower, scrubbing each other’s backs. But the mine closes, Locke and Langer lose their jobs and with them their (male) identities.

Where nicknames like Locke and Langer may have represented snarky coarseness and masculine self-irony in the harsh underworld of the opencast mine, such old-man quirks outside the social space of the mine are nothing more than anachronistic ridiculousness. And so Locke and Langer, as well as three other protagonists who have also lost their jobs at mining companies, including the trans person Martina, have to struggle with the loss of many social and identity securities.

The film is divided into two parts – in the first part we see the last weeks of the mines, in the second part the directors Christian Johannes Koch and Jonas Matauschek accompany their protagonists as they reorganize their lives. Koch and Matauschek combine the classic documentary form with narrative influences; some scenes are obviously staged to create a narrative flow. However, the latter only works to a limited extent; an exciting story never really emerges. Above all, the attempt to turn the documentary into a kind of road movie fails due to the banality of the events: Locke and Langer’s trip to France in the motorhome is strongly reminiscent of films about family vacations and the like, and who other than those involved wants to see something like that ?

The film is strong when it documents things from a bit of a distance. Where a cranky character like the eternal bachelor Thomas, who still lives with his mother in old age, or Kiri, who immigrated from Sri Lanka, who speaks broad Westphalian with a Sri Lankan accent, or the trans woman Martina in the harsh but warm Having spent a large part of their social life in the male world of mining and finding a kind of safe space there, the world outside of the wage labor prison feels quite alien. While Thomas now has to face his domineering mother, Locke is at home struggling with the vacuum cleaner and at the same time with his heavily pubescent daughter, and when he asks her to get involved in the work, she screams at him to get a job Don’t annoy them.

But we also watch as these people emancipate themselves, as they begin to see themselves as more than just a producer of added value. Tall Tall now drives school buses and emphasizes persistently (and not entirely wrongly) how important this job is. Locke organizes the trip to France and is interested in environmental issues, Martina finds a new job in salt mining. Her story is perhaps the most interesting in the film because it makes it easy to observe how progressive such classic workers’ groups and collegiate often are or were and how important such safe social spaces are. Her change is more or less easily accepted by her colleagues, even though after her gender reassignment she was asked in all seriousness whether she would like to eat some meat rolls with them now.

“We were buddies” is a fairly precise observation of social conditions and changes. And even if the protagonists are all sympathetic figures (it might also have been interesting to accompany a worker who feels drawn to the AfD or other fascist movements and parties), this is a film with discursive potential , which we hope will attract a lot of interest from the public.

“We were buddies”, Germany 2023. Director and book: Christian Johannes Koch, Jonas Matauschek. 104 min. Cinema release: February 29th.