KREENHOLM
3 films:
images: Eléonore de Montesquiou
music and sound: Marcel Türkowsky
-part 1: The manufacture (25 min)
-part 2: The last units (15 min.)
-part 3: A talk with Oleg Klushin (30 min.)
original language: Russian
w/ English subtitles (or Estonian)
black and white
Estonia
- Kreenholm, the manufacture
part 1 (25 min.): a history of textile industry
- The last units
part 2 (15 min.): the last workers in the manufacture today
In February 2008, a worker showed me around the Kreenholm textile factory. It was a one-day opportunity to film inside a factory which is gradually closing down and this employee, an electrician who has been working there for forty years, would soon lose his job. Inside the factory, I filmed the last days of the spinning and weaving machines.
I returned one year later, in 2009, to find that the buildings I visited previously had all closed down. However, I was permitted to film the last production units operated by a few hundred workers: bleaching, printing and sewing fabrics imported from Turkey, India and Pakistan.
My film tells the story of this textile factory at the border of Estonia and Russia through the memories of an elderly woman, Dora. She recalls how her family’s story is intertwined with that of the fabric, and of the generations that have worked there. Kreenholm was a unique example of 19th century industrial organisation..
The last decades of its life as a factory reflect the current development of the textile industry from technocracy to brand-building and marketing. Delocalization, restructuring and globalization are all well-known today and in this region they have induced an economic disaster -- specifically for the cities of Narva and Ivangorod.
The film alternates between images of Kreenholm today and from historical photographic and film archives.
- Oleg Klushin
part 3 (30 min.) :
A talk with Oleg Klushin who was director of Kreenholm manufacture in the 1980s.
with the participation of Ekaterina Moskalenko. He explains how the slow decline of Kreenholm reflects a change in the philosophy of textile production as well as a change in leadership, from technocracy to brandmaking."