Meine Stadt, deine Stadt

With a commentary by Nanna Heidenreich
Followed by a joint discussion with Nanna Heidenreich and Merle Kröger

Navina Sundaram portrays the city of Mannheim from the perspectives of two workers: Heinz Schmid, a native of Mannheim, and Abdul Rahman, a guest worker from Turkey. Both work at the Mercedes Benz plant, Schmid as a skilled worker, Rahman as a laborer and union shop steward. Between the allotment, the carnival club and the new apartments in the suburbs, an image of a working-class city emerges that goes beyond bourgeois ideas of urban culture and urban history. Sundaram critically and persistently questions the concept of solidarity, extended to the relations between German and Turkish workers. Without false pathos, the film tells of latent and overt racism, but also of private happiness, material success and the fading dream of returning to Turkey.

Nanna Heidenreich is a media culture scholar and curator of film/video/theory/interventions. She has been a professor of Transcultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna since October 2020. As a curator she has worked for HKW, Berlinale Forum Expanded, AdKdW Cologne.