Palermo or Wolfsburg

A poor young man from Sicily travels to Wolfsburg in West Germany to find work. He crosses northern Italy by train and, on arriving, takes a job at the car factory. The film does not shorten the journey; the going itself takes up much of the account and the distance is made physically felt. Life at the factory and the village he left behind stand like two separate times. The account offers migration as neither a deliverance nor a catastrophe; it shows how the pressure to fit in works. Its length of a hundred and seventy five minutes is a deliberate choice, and the events are built with patience. Not knowing the language stands throughout as an obstacle. Nicola Zarbo and Otto Sander appear in Werner Schroeter’s German film, completed in 1980.