Good Work at the Movies

Through the magic of "product placement," consumer-product companies have become adept at using movies to boost the recognition of their brands. But when it comes to how movies and television portray business generally, the corporate community has been a miserable failure. Invariably, business serves as the negative backdrop against which the central personal or political drama can unfold, while corporate managers serve as stick-figure foils for heroes and comic buffoons.

As is often the case, however, Hollywood's blind spot offers a target of opportunity for independent filmmakers. And, indeed, you'll find some wonderfully insightful views about business and work life at the Silverdocs, the documentary conference and film festival next week in Silver Spring put on by the American Film Institute and the Discovery Channel.

"Losers and Winners," by Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken, for example, is about a coke factory (that's the material used to make steel, not the soft drink) built in Germany's industrial heartland, the Ruhr Valley. After it was completed in the early 1990s, the sprawling $800 million complex was billed as the most modern and efficient anywhere in the world, a monument to German engineering prowess. Unfortunately, it came on line just as the world price of steel and coke collapsed and Europe's steelmakers began to import cheaper foreign coke from Asia and Eastern Europe.

The film picks up the story just after the complex has been shuttered and sold to one of China's leading industrial companies, Yangkuang. The Chinese, however, are not going to operate the plant there in Germany. Rather, their plan is to take it apart, piece by piece, ship it halfway around the world and reassemble it in China. The executive sent from China to oversee the effort -- an amateur poet with a hankering for a new Mercedes -- boasts that Yangkuang's plan is to build several more plants just like it.

This is not a feat, however, that can be accomplished economically by German workers. So Yangkuang hires a Chinese contracting company that flies in several hundred young Chinese men to do the job. Working 10 hours a day, seven days a week, for about $525 a month payable only at the completion of the project, these "comrades" work, sleep, eat and watch television together under the supervision of Communist Party officials and a handful of German engineers kept on to advise.

In documenting this year-long process, "Losers and Winners" focuses on the cultural differences and tensions between the Chinese and the Europeans. The Germans are constantly frustrated in their attempts to get their charges to adhere to local labor and environmental regulations and are sure the Chinese will never figure out how to reassemble the plant and run it efficiently. Meanwhile, the young Asian workers mock the "old foreigners" for their short hours and long breaks, and quietly seethe at the not-so-subtle suggestions that they don't know what they are doing.

Most poignant is the difference in the way the two groups view the plant itself. For the Germans, it symbolizes not just the loss of economic competitiveness but, more importantly, the loss of work and technological prowess in which German workers have always taken such pride.

"You get attached to these things," said a German engineer, running his hand over metal parts that he once helped design and maintain. "I am part of this plant. Maybe just a little cog, but a necessary part."

For the Chinese, on the other hand, the work has nothing to do with giving personal meaning to their lives. Rather, it is part of a collective effort to lift China into the first rank of nations. At a celebration just before their departure, an official of the demolition company uses military language in toasting the project's success, declaring that they will all return home "victorious." Another dreams of the day he'll be back to dismantle and ship a German Airbus plant.

The theme of people taking meaning from their work is also the subject of two American documentaries to be shown at Silverdocs.

Ben Niles's "Note by Note" is a delightful journey of one concert grand piano, L1037, as it makes its way through the production process at the Steinway factory in Brooklyn. Along the way, you meet a wonderfully diverse set of skilled craftsmen who make a piano pretty much the way it was made a hundred years ago. These include a Polish woman who completes the frame, a Russian who installs the sounding board, a Jamaican who fits in the metal frame and a neighborhood kid who once played tag in the Steinway lumberyard and now checks the action of the felt hammers. You also get to listen in as famous pianists sample the inventory before deciding which one to have sent over to Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall. What both music-makers and piano-makers have in common is the incredible care and pride they take in striving for perfection.

At the other end of the cultural spectrum, Doug Pray's "Big Rig" offers a peek into the life and work of the long-haul trucker. Pray's themes are also pride and respect -- the pride the truckers take in their work, their equipment, their families and their country, and the respect they miss from the rest of us. The photography is spectacular and the characters are genuine and sympathetic, no less for their foibles than for their self-reliance and unadorned dignity.

Perhaps the most charming of the life-and-work documentaries is also one of the shortest. "Calcutta Calling," by Andre Hoermann of Germany, lets you in on the hard work and raw ambition at the other end of those annoying telemarketing calls from a place far away. Hoermann's hero is a confident young Indian who sports a down-under accent touting a new telephone service in Melbourne, then switches to a slight Cockney lilt when peddling fire extinguishers to housewives in Liverpool. By the time the credits roll, you're actually rooting for him to make the sale.

Of course, not every documentary on the Silverdocs program is as sympathetic to moneymaking. There's a natural anti-commercial bias to Rob VanAlkemade's documentary, "What Would Jesus Buy?," based on the life and songs of Rev. Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir. But I'll leave it to my famously parsimonious colleague, Michelle Singletary, to comment on that one.

For more information on Silverdocs, go tohttp://silverdocs.com.