Peter Nestler Q&A + A Working Men's Club in Sheffield + By the Dike Sluice

From the archive

This film was last shown on 3 November 2013

Peter Nestler (b.1937) started his career in the early 1960s with a series of poetic films about the changes in rural and industrial areas, including By the Dike Sluice (1962), which describes the life of a German coastal town from the unusual perspective of a sluice, and A Working Men's Club in Sheffield (1965), a loving portrait of the Dial House Club and the city's working class life in the 1960s. In his many other documentaries, Nestler has focused on the struggle against fascism, the history of labour and production, immigration, memory, and ecology. In the late 1960s Peter Nestler moved from Germany to Sweden, where he still lives today.

Unable to attend the very well received screening of A Working Men’s Club in Sheffield last year, Peter Nestler this time will be present for a Q & A after the screening.

In association with Goethe-Institut London

about peter nestler

Peter Nestler (b.1937) is one of the most singular and important filmmakers to emerge in postwar Germany. In the early 1960s Nestler made a series of poetic films about the changing realities in rural and industrial areas and about the working class communities, mostly in Germany, but also in the UK, where he filmed A Working Men's Club in Sheffield (1965). In the same year he directed From Greece (1965), on the rise of and struggle against fascism followed by the unsparing and exigent In the Ruhr Area (1967). Opposition to his political views and film aesthetics led Nestler to Sweden, where he worked mostly for television. Since the 1970s, Nestler has directed an extraordinary body of work further expanding the form and themes of his first films, including history, the working class, anti-fascism, the history of labour and production, and immigration. In the past 20 years, Nestler's films have continued to focus on change, remembrance and preservation, as exemplified by The North Calotte (1991), a remarkable travelogue tracing the harmful effects of industrialisation on the Sami communities and the landscape of Northern Europe. Peter Nestler's most recent film is Death and Devil (2009).