Monobloc

The monobloc plastic chair is the best-selling piece of furniture that ever existed, known on every continent, across all national borders and social boundaries. Estimates claim that there are a billion units of this chair worldwide. At the very least.

A feature-length documentary, MONOBLOC tells the story of how this unsightly plastic chair took the world by storm. How this chair destroys livelihoods and brings affluence. How it threatens our environment and ‘good taste’. Yet also about how the monobloc chair makes disabled people happy and the many, many millions to whom a chair is a chair and nothing more.
MONOBLOC is structured into 7 episodes, filmed on 5 continents. Each of these episodes tells a self-contained story involving different themes, inter alia beauty and design, economic rise and competition, globalisation and efficiency, ideas and ideals. To accomplish this the film accompanies protagonists, both men and women, whose lives are closely linked to the monobloc. The feature-length documentary MONOBLOC pieces all these stories together via a simple, clear-cut dramatic composition to form an intriguing, highly entertaining, and in parts deeply moving quest for clues around the globe.

Based on the examples of his protagonists, the award-winning director Hauke Wendler breaks our ultracomplex consumer world down to the question of what it truly takes in life to be happy. Distinctively marked by powerful images, a film that lives through its contrasts: In Germany, Italy and the USA. From the slums of Brazil across the megacities of India to the velds and savannahs of Uganda.