A film of major artistic and social significance, G.W. Pabst's Kameradschaft is both a daring experiment in realistic sound cinema and a deeply moving assertion of international working class solidarity. Based on a true incident, the film depicts a mining disaster on the Franco-German border in 1919, where German miners come to the rescue of their entombed French brothers - wartime enmities and the interests of the bosses to the contrary. According to Sadoul:
“Pabst's style is sober, restrained and quasi-documentary in approach. There is no musical background, but Pabst's use of natural sounds is very expressive - the rumble of machinery, the sighing and groaning of the mine shaft after the disaster, a popular orchestra, the sound of which is not always synchronized with the image. This is one of Pabst's best films and one of the few films in the West during the Thirties that portrayed truthfully the life of thousands of ordinary workers.”