In the organizer's words:

The Duisburg Film Week is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and is marking the occasion with film programs and collaborations throughout the year ahead of the 50th edition of the festival, which will take place in Duisburg from 2 to 8 November 2026.

Around the symposium "WORK IN PROGRESS. Representations of Work in Documentary Film" of the documentary film initiative dfi, documentary films from the program archive of the Duisburg Film Week will be shown at the Filmhaus Köln. The programme complements the dfi symposium with encounters with initially "foreign" worlds of work, subtle rhythms of globalized work and the reflection of work on the image.

OLANDA (Bernd Schoch, D 2019 / 154′)

With an introduction by festival director Alexander Scholz.

A proliferating mycelium. The starry sky over the Romanian Carpathians. The first two images define the dimensions to which Olanda is dedicated: details and fine structures on the one hand, constellations and the big picture on the other. The focus is on a seasonal commodity of the region - the mushroom. Of all the people, it is the foragers who are closest to it and the film is primarily with them: on walks through the forest, in the tent camp, on car trips and in conversations. From here, it follows the rhizome-like ramifications that branch out further and further in the form of money: to local and international traders, to an improvised shoe market in a clearing, to gambling among colleagues.

The film tells of these trade cycles by taking on a mushroom-like structure itself, without ever losing its intellectual center. Beyond an analysis of economic structures, however, it is also a sensual document of the rhythm of everyday life in the forest, as experienced by the collectors as the first link in the exploitation chain. In the cinema, it can be experienced as an audiovisual mushroom trip into the magical world of the Carpathian forests. (Alejandro Bachmann)