The work that goes into making films is invisible to us in most case. Yet the portrayal of work on screen has been visible since the beginning of cinema: from the Lumière brothers glimpse of the end of a workday in France to the backdrop of social dramas in the century of cinema that followed. Several films in the Berlinale this year feature labour in one form or another; this session takes a closer look at three of them, featured in Panorama, Encounters and Generation: Working Class Heroes introduces us to a group of construction workers and their struggle against their criminal bosses in Serbia. Unrueh, a Swiss period film, harks us back to a bygone world of watch manufacturing, offering surprising analogies with contemporary working culture, while the documentary feature Terykony takes us to the Ukrainian-Russian border area, where teenager Nastya develops survival skills to sustain herself. If the very meaning of work is undergoing radical change today, these films, and their makers, chart out what this change means to our sense of self.