Die wundersame Reise der unnützen Dinge

The sofa is old, the upholstery faded, the wooden frame has many quirks. For 75 years, people have sat on it, with their worries, dreams and hopes. But the sofa is no longer in a living room, it's on the side of the road. It's bulky waste in Bodenheim am Rhein. Regina Leupold is clearing out her practice and her apartment, because she is "downsizing," as she says. The thought of everything ending up in the trash hurts. But there's no room in Regina Leupold's new home. An ancient yellow van turns the corner. It's the fifth van with Polish license plates to pass by in the last quarter of an hour, an attentive driver behind the wheel, appraising every new item that comes out. For a long time now, hardly anything of what is put in the bulky waste in Germany actually ends up in the trash. By far the greater part starts its journey eastward. Regina Leupold's sofa, three armchairs and a small tapestry also disappear into the hold of Piotr Liszcz and Jan Mysliwiec's car. Piotr was one of the first to drive to Germany to sift through the mountains of bulky waste and sell anything usable at home. In the meantime, regular columns of Polish, Hungarian, Romanian and Ukrainian vans are part of the street scene in the villages of Rhine-Hesse on the days before bulky waste collection. "At the table of the rich, even the dogs get their fill," says Piotr Liszcz. "We are not guests here. We are intruders, not guests. No one invites us. We have to behave absolutely inconspicuously, be quiet, don't make a mess, don't drink alcohol." Not easy when life takes place between piles of bulky waste and public parking lots where the men sort goods, eat, take breaks and spend the night in their cars before heading to the next village or home. For filmmaker Katja Schupp and award-winning cameraman Hartmut Seifert, Piotr was a stroke of luck, because most of the men who travel as bulky waste collectors prefer to hide, not wanting to risk anything, avoiding contact with Germans, much less any camera. They know only too well how widespread the prejudices - even more than five years after Poland joined the EU - still are. "Stolen today, already in Poland tomorrow" is what the filmmakers also get to hear again and again. So it was not without reason that more than two and a half years passed since the first contact with Piotr Liszcz and the men who work with him until the documentary was finished. It convinces with a deep closeness to the Polish bulky waste collectors, who let the camera be there from the moment they get up to the moment they go to bed in the cramped multi-bed caravans.