Über die Jahre

In 2004, Nikolaus Geyrhalter visits a textile factory whose future is uncertain, the vestige of a bygone age, where fewer than ten employees still work. When it closes its doors a few months later, he decides to continue filming these men and women. He does so for ten years, following the diverging and unpredictable paths of each one. While this epic tells us something about a certain social class in the early twenty-first century, it aims above all to show how these people are much more than and much different from the “former workers of a textile factory”. Focusing on the way they perceive themselves and talk about their lives, the filmmaker shows with striking clarity the value that each one has, at a time when society struggles to find a use for them. (Olivia Cooper-Hadjian)