The Nothing Factory

Early on in The Nothing Factory, a montage of drive-by shots of decrepit factories is accompanied by the disembodied voice of one of the film’s characters, solemnly intoning on the soundtrack, “a spectre is haunting Europe. The spectre of its ending.” Portuguese documentary filmmaker Pedro Pinho’s narrative debut makes its position clear from its very first shots, in which excavators tear down a water tank, the shrieking of metal being stripped on the soundtrack. Pinho cuts to the process of metal being pressed in the factory, making explicit the film’s essential premise – the link between overproduction and waste, and the consequences once this process becomes terminally unsustainable.

The film contains its capitalist critique to a Lisbon lift factory that is being wound down by management. Mass redundancies are sold as “readjustments” and an “opportunity to make the team stronger”...