Susis Schicht

For her first student film, Petra Tschörtner went to a factory of the VEB (Publicly Owned Corporation) Combine Secondary Raw Material Collection (SERO), which was part of the East German waste industry. A consistent observation, the film follows a young worker through her shift, shows mountains of used paper (especially the “Neues Deutschland” daily every member of the SED had to subscribe to) being handled and shredded. You see workers, many of them women, performing simple and strenuous tasks and suspect that they belong to the lower margins of GDR society. A sensitive camera registers details of facial expressions and postures, revealing how here, too, women are subject to a hierarchy.