Winner of awards at London and Leipzig film festivals, this is a sober look at working lives in the 21st century, which are mostly invisible to the consumers of the products of their labours.  It's in 5 separate sections: Ukrainian miners, who dig their own narrow-seamed mineshafts, contrasted with film from the Thirties of miners presented as happy national heroes; diggers of sulphur in Indonesia; animal slaughterers in Nigeria; Pashtun shipbreakers in Pakistan, and Chinese foundry workers. Finally there's a brief look at an old industrial site which is now a museum to shown what heavy industrial work used to be like.

  There's no commentary: the people speak for themselves. The Chinese have pride in what they do, are well-informed, see their labours in a larger scheme of things, not just as a day-to-day grind to be somehow survived. The ship breakers, in a section of some beauty, are mild and devout. The outstanding section is the Nigerian one, almost unwatchable at times. "Abbatoir" seems a too clean, civilised word for this hellish place, where beasts are brought, held down, killed or half-killed, chopped up, then blackened in foul fires made of bones and rubber tyres. It's shocking and grotesque - sandalled feet spattered with blood plash about in the wet black mud, a man carries a pair of cow ribs slung over his shoulder like a matador's jacket. What a contrast to our so called 'clean' mechanised killing houses.
It's very objective and not at all manipulative of our emotions. These are all hard, unpleasant, dirty jobs, but we hardly enter into the inner worlds of the individuals, who are strangely accepting of their work. It is a very cerebral delivery of a truth about the reality of life for so many people, more an important historical document than a poem, which at least shows that humans are capable of incredible resilience, and even the most awful of work is something that can be survived and accommodated. 

Seen at Transilvania Film Festival , Cluj, 6 June 2006