„WANDERARBEITER, FREMDARBEITER, GASTARBEITER"
Film screening
Mon 15 December 2025, 7 p.m.

Free admission. No registration required.

Wanderarbeiter, Fremdarbeiter, Gastarbeiter“ (1989) des SWR
26 minutes, german without subtitles

Film screening and talk with Sophia La Mela

"Last year, during a visit to my aunts, uncles, and cousins in Friedrichshafen, I asked them questions: When exactly did Nonno come to Germany to work, Zio? What was your life like in Sicily, Zia? Over a plate of Swabian spaetzle, my uncle dug out a DVD that no one had ever told me about before. Part of our family history is featured in this film about “the Italians in Friedrichshafen.” And it's told from the perspective of three generations: my cousin, my aunt, and my grandparents. It was the first time I had ever seen and heard Nonno in motion. He had died a year before I was born.

I would like to share this film with you because it is much more than just a memory of our family. The film is a historical source of how Italian life and the history of Italian workers and their families were reported at the time."

Sophia La Mela is the daughter of parents with Italian and Polish immigrant backgrounds. Her grandfather came to Germany at the end of the 1950s as a so-called “guest worker” and settled on Lake Constance. Sophia never learned her parents' first language fluently. Because Italian was not offered at school, she chose Spanish to feel a little closer to Italian. This led to her studying Spanish, Latin American Studies, and Cultural and Social Anthropology. Sophia currently creates teaching materials in political education for young people, organizes concerts and workshops in various cultural fields for young people, and is a dancer in the terrain tanzkollektiv. Together with her sister, she has recently been increasingly interested in her family history, Italy, and Poland.