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Short abstract

Cross-border workers from Poland employed in warehouses in Brandenburg, Germany, and the gigafactory producing electric cars near the border, spend 3-5 hours a day commuting. In this film, they talk about their daily commute and its impact on their lives.

Long abstract

The film explores the experiences of cross-border workers who commute daily between the regions of Lubuskie in Poland and Brandenburg in Germany. In their narratives, the road emerges as a structuring principle of mobile lives within the “inner peripheries”: both the spatial and temporal logic of everyday life and the affective emphasis within the narratives are centred on travel. Given this focus and the dispersed nature of our field, we adopted a multi-sited and mobile approach, following workers’ routes between places of residence and work. This fieldwork strategy, documented in the film, responded to the limited time of our research participants and allowed us to understand their experiences of everyday mobility better. While the film’s soundtrack aims to amplify marginalised voices, articulating the spatiotemporal dimensions of cross-border labour, the visuals aim to convey the experience of being on the road, creating a point of convergence between researchers and participants.

Cite as: Goldstein, Piotr, Olga Łojewska, and Maksymilian Awuah. 2024. This Week Doesn’t Really Exist. Short ethnographic documentary. Germany/Poland. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.31071.27041