Farocki’s newest film continues in the vein of his recent work by using observational documentary to patiently witness processes in action, but whereas many of these films have focused on the service industry or on training sessions, In Comparison returns to Farocki’s abiding interest in labor and production. The film describes the manufacture of bricks in many different contexts, the literal building blocks of the world - from the collective efforts of a community building a clinic in Burkina Faso through semi-industrialized mouldings in India to industrial production lines in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland.

This engrossing observational documentary follows a pair of entrepreneurs and the venture capital bankers whom they are trying to convince to loan them the necessary start-up money for their manufacturing business. Farocki’s fly-on-the-wall camera watches two days of careful negotiations between the two teams in what amounts to an ethnographic study of the workings of twenty-first century, pre-recession capitalism. The film was one of the inspirations for Christian Petzold’s Yella (2007).