Martha (GDR, 1979) Slatan Dudow

Martha, a 68-year-old woman, works at the conveyor belt at the Rummelsberg dump. She was a Trümmerfrau – one of the women who cleared bomb debris in Berlin after WWII. Wearing a baggy jacket, she now picks trash out of piles of rubble every day. She allows a film crew to shoot her and her brigade in the final days before she retires and later in the spring. In a rough, warm tone that lacks self-pity, she describes how it was to start anew in bombed-out Berlin, to rebuild the city with her bare hands and to do hard physical labor all her life. At the end, she sits happily in front of the camera, looking forward to “putting her feet up”.