In 2016, the Duisburg Film Week celebrated its 40th edition, and in 2017, its director Werner Ruzicka celebrated his 70th birthday. In 2018, he will give his farewell presentation - an occasion to reflect on the past. Ruzicka will have shaped the festival for 33 years, significantly influencing the cultural life of Germany's third poorest city. This is a conversation about the new and old left in the Ruhr area of the 1970s, trips to Leipzig before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the regional and film cultural structural changes - an oral history of (West) German documentary film history from a Duisburg perspective.