
Home Hope Opel
DOCU | FILM | TV
Germany 2012
91 Min (Original with english subtitles)
Directors: Ulrike Franke, Michael Loeken
Six young people on their way to becoming industrial mechanics at Opel – facing a future which seems more uncertain than ever. We follow Jerome, André, Sinan, Tim, Marius and Marcel, with all their hopes and fears, through this period of radical change. A film about global strategies and local and personal life plans.
TRAILER
AWARDS

FESTIVALS
2012 — DOK Leipzig / 55. Internationales Leipziger Festival für Dokumentar- und Animationsfilm, Germany
2012 — 23. Kinofest Lünen, Germany
2013 — Dokumentarfilmfest / 15. Stranger Than Fiction, Germany
2013 — 21. Der neue Heimatfilm / Freistadt, Austria
2014 — Ruhrtriennale, Germany
2023 — Ruhrtriennale / Film Retrospective loekenfranke / Bochum
SYMPOSIUM
2013 — Tutorial / Literatur und Film der Arbeitswelt / Pädagogische Hochschule Linz, Austria
REVIEWS
„For all its documentary narrative, this film is a piece about the a coal-mining district, about youth culture – part social study and part economic thriller. And it’s the story of a few insecure students who today, long after the last day of shooting, can confidently say: „We’ve all grown up.“ The story Franke and Loeken tell is without ornamentation, nothing is embellished, not even with music: their soundtrack is the noise of the machines, the singing of the birds early at the factory gate and the language of the protagonists.“
Annika Fischer // Der Westen // 03.12.2012
„Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken accompany six 16- to 19-year-olds, who start their apprenticeships as industrial mechanics at the Opel plant in Bochum in 2009, and their master craftsman. They are there when the boys put on the Opel shirts for the first time, sweat at the drill and lathe, measure for the hundredth time, despair, can’t please Mr Kranz again, get bored in the union meeting and play with their phones, and suddenly – right before the exam – completely lose their cool.“
Grit Lemke // at DOK Leipzig (International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film) 2012
STILLS








SYNOPSIS
HOME HOPE OPEL profiles six young people, aged 16 to 19, who began their apprenticeships as industrial mechanics at the Opel plant in Bochum, Germany in 2009. While they must learn to cope with a new phase in their lives, the start of their professional careers and approaching departure from the security of their parental homes, Opel itself is being sucked deeper and deeper into the maelstrom of the international financial crisis and facing ever-increasing economic pressure. We follow Jerome, André, Sinan, Tim, Marius and Marcel, with all their hopes and fears, through this period of radical change; we are introduced to their dreams for the future as well as their worries. They stand at the threshold of a professional life whose future is already uncertain.
At the same time, ARBEIT HEIMAT OPEL contrasts the everyday lives of the Plant II apprentices with GM and Opel’s fortunes on the world stage on two seemingly unrelated levels. Despite their distance both in physical and in media terms, the two levels repeatedly intersect and come into contact with one another, connecting global strategies with local and personal life plans – and vice versa.
CREDITS
Home Hope Opel
Gemany 2012
91 Min (Original with english subtitles)
ARBEIT HEIMAT OPEL
Deutschland 2012
91 Min (D)
Directors: Ulrike Franke, Michael Loeken
Director of Photography: Jörg Adams, Michael Loeken, Reinhard Köcher, Dieter Stürmer
Location Sound: Filipp Forberg, Axel Schmidt
Editor: Bert Schmidt
Commissioning Editor: Jutta Krug
Supported by: WDR