After completing The Kingdom of Naples Schroeter knew he wanted to return to Italy with cinematographer Thomas Mauch, working quickly to make Palermo or Wolfsburg, a similarly more socially conscious film project depicting a young Sicilian peasant who travels to Germany as a Gastarbeiter. Here Schroeter’s habitual excess melds with a neorealist tendency across the duality of these two lives and cities – north and south, romantic and taciturn – winning him the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.