Workingman's Death

The documentary asks one question: is heavy physical labour actually disappearing, or is it only becoming invisible. It looks for the answer in five places. People digging coal illegally in closed mines in Ukraine, men carrying sulphur on their backs out of a volcano in Indonesia, workers at an open-air slaughterhouse in Nigeria, men cutting a vast tanker apart by hand in Pakistan, and steelworkers in China. Michael Glawogger's film offers no commentary and no explanation; it puts the camera beside the work and leaves it there. The images are sometimes beautiful and sometimes unbearable, and the two do not separate. Each of the five sections has a name, and the last one looks towards the future. What it still means, across a large part of the world, to work with your body is made visible in a way no statistic could manage.