The reality series Girls who drive was an unexpected hit in 2021 and 2022. At the peak, 800,000 people watched the female truck drivers on European roads on NPO3. Flemish women who drive (Powned) the Dutch also like it, it turns out. Thursday evening was the twelfth and last part about the ‘lady truckers’ from Flanders. Sometimes there is a pink wool around their steering wheel, a few have painted their nails, but they can all swear like… truck drivers.
In the cabin with Anouschka (40), who drives on doggedly with her back and neck hernia. With Tineke (34) stopping involuntarily, her lower body started to tingle, she recently learned it was MS. With Alexia (37) driving her own car. Through them you can see how the cogs work in logistics Europe. They load sow and piglet manure on a Flemish farm and unload it on a Dutch pasture. They transport potatoes, sacks of flour and waste water to and from France, and load their trailers full of tree trunks in a German forest. They enjoy being on the road, they say. “No children, no household, this is me time”.
To the moon
Biggest difference with the Bulgarian truck driver Petar in the Flemish-Dutch documentary A parked life: the women come home after a day or a week of driving. Not him. He is in an “eternal orbit around Europe”. Always away from wife and child for three consecutive months to drive goods back and forth somewhere in Europe. The first month he is still at home in his mind, he says. “The second month I am a robot. Loading, unloading, driving, sleeping.” Month three he is “mentally exhausted”. All the accidents he made always happened in that last month. Then he is flown home and after a short break everything starts again. “Every two years I drive the distance from the earth to the moon.”
Europe is free movement of goods, capital, people and labour. Petar and an army of other Bulgarian drivers deliver the cheapest labor and are hired for their services by carriers in Sweden or Portugal. “Without us, Europe is a collection of countries, we connect the parts, deliver the goods and make Europe Europe.” Money is what keeps him going, says Petar. As an international trucker he earns better than in Bulgaria, so he can afford a car and a house, where his wife Snezhina lives with their son Jordan.
Petar is followed for three years. Always in a different truck, always in a different country. Where he is can only be deduced from the weather or the environment behind his windshield. Sometimes the road is snowy, then again the sun shines annoyingly in his eyes. He passes mountains, meadows, ports, factories and is stuck in traffic around Paris. He peels his potatoes, cooks them on a gas burner in the trailer, eats them alone. He does his laundry in an abandoned parking lot and hangs it to dry on his truck, urinates standing up from the cabin, I have not actually seen him shower. And even when he visits a church, you can see the road traffic rushing past through the windows in the background.
Petar is on the road for so long that he slowly loses home. The Facetime conversations with Snezhina are initially cheerful, but become more grim over time with hateful back and forth. The breaking point is the baptism of their son – he is now four. Petar has not been waited for. The film begins and ends with Snezhina’s tinny voice ringing in her wishes for visitation and alimony, drowned out by the continuous hum of Petar’s diesel engine.