AllMovie

Filmmaker James Benning takes a long and careful look at several emblematic moments in the life of one German community in this experimental feature. In Ruhr, Benning presents six scenes of life in the Ruhr Valley of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, where his parents were born. Each scene is presented in a single, uninterrupted shot, with the takes running from seven minutes to a full hour. Benning's subjects include a tunnel running under the city streets, jets crossing the sky in a wooded area near an airport, worshipers in a mosque, graffiti being scrubbed from a sculpture, a roadway as people head home from work, and a steel mill as finished materials are being loaded out. As the shots play themselves out, the images seem at once familiar and alien, and their impact is greater than the benign, simple surfaces would suggest. Ruhr was an official selection at the 2010 Rotterdam International Film Festival.