Jochen ­ ein Golzower aus Philadelphia (A Golzower from Philadelphia)

Don’t bother to count ­ yes, this is our eighth report on Die Kinder von Golzow, the longest ongoing documentary in the history of cinema, as acknowledged in the Guinness Book of World Records. For background information on The Children of Golzow, check KINO’s 49, 50, 61, 64/65, 69, 71, and 74 for other biographical portraits of these children in a first-grade classroom in the town of Golzow of the rural Oderbruch district of the German Democratic Republic.

       But this footnote first off: Barbara and Winfried Junge’s Jochen ­ A Golzower from Philadelphia is the 17th feature-length documentary in the series stretching back exactly 40 years to the erection of the Berlin wall and the fence separating the two Germanys in August of 1961. According to Karl Gass, the mentor for the project at the DEFA Documentary Studio, the original idea was to document the life-styles of a new generation of children educated to socialist ideals. But when the wall came down, the thematic focus then shifted to the experiences of the young men and women after they had finished their ten years of schooling, encountered a first love and/or married, chose a profession, founded a family, and dealt with the social changes brought about by German unification. In the case of Jochen, the son of an agricultural functionary born in the village of Philadelphia in eastern Germany, he spent one year at the Golzow school before the family moved on to Bernau near Berlin. But the Junge team kept track of him over the years - and we meet a hearty, friendly soul who still is a farm worker and has always held his head high as worker, friend, husband, and father.

Ronald Holloway