After both Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl were mutilated by the censors and met with hostility by the critics, Pabst turned, with Westfront 1918 and Kameradschaft, away from the subject of bourgeois hypocrisy regarding female sexuality, to equally trenchant studies of attitudes toward “male” subjects: war and camaraderie. 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 in defiance of wartime enmities and the interests of the bosses.
French film historian Georges Sadoul writes: “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.”
Kameradschaft is presented in a 35mm vault print that contains footage missing from most circulating prints.