This program features Peter Nestler’s first and second films, set in a small seaside village and a rural primary school in the village of Reid, Switzerland, respectively; and a film about the history of Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto from the middle ages to the present day.

Three films about work, industrialization, and change, set in a Swabian village in the 1960s, a small town in the Ruhr region, and a men’s club in Sheffield.

Nestler’s feature The North Calotte, an extraordinary journey through Northern Europe chronicling the devastating impact of industrialization on the region’s environment and indigenous cultures, is preceded by a short about a tragic mining accident.

In the 1970s, Peter and his wife, Zsóka Nestler, collaborated on a series of educational films for television that focused on craft-making. These “biographies of objects” are rigorous investigations into the history of working techniques, production processes, and materials.

In these films about war, Nestler composes an emotional condemnation of the U.S.’s role in the war in North Vietnam, made of photographs by Thomas Billhardt, and investigates ideas of internationalism and solidarity with testimonies from those who fought during the Spanish Civil War.

Nestler reckons with Germany’s twentieth-century legacy and denounces the treatment of workers in these films about labor exploitation, fascism, and capitalism.

This selection features an urgent, anti-fascist documentary about political crises in Greece and another that confronts the persecution of the Roma and Sinti in Germany under Nazism and its persistence after the war; plus a short by Straub-Huillet about the persecution of Jews in Europe.

This diverse program features one of Nestler and his wife Zsóka’s most beautiful works (Up the Danube, following a riverboat upstream, excavating the river’s layers of history), and one of Nestler’s most personal (Death and Devil, about the contradictory biography of his Swedish grandfather), plus his animated adaptation of a short story by Israeli writer Etgar Keret.

Nestler’s film is “about the indigenous cultures of Ecuador, of what is past and what is preserved, of destruction and resistance, of persisting in new ways, of music in the villages high up in the Andes, of music in the cities and in a tropical climate among descendants of African slaves.”