The Labor Film Database lists thousands of films and videos, searchable by title, director, actors and/or keywords (see search window at right). We’ve also categorized the database (at right, below “Categories”) and you can check out our tag cloud (also at right) to make it easier to find films and videos about the topics you’re interested in. Many of the entries also include trailers and film stills. Categories include: Highly Recommended Labor Films; Labor Film Festivals; New/Just Added; Available Online; Genre; Occupation/Type of Work; Themes.
Recent additions include “Sorry to Bother You”
HELP BUILD THE DATABASE! The Database is a handy resource for labor film festival programmers and anyone interested in films about work, workers and worker’s issues.We’re constantly updating the database with films new and old and welcome your suggestions for additions; just complete the comment form (see “Leave a Reply” below).
evanjones2016
February 25, 2017 at 11:42 pm
Hi I just noticed Chris Garlock’s piece on Counterpunch June 2013 ‘Screening the Class Struggle’. Very impressed that you’ve been doing festivals on this theme in DC for some time.
I’ve been interested in this genre for decades, not least after seeing Harlan County USA when it came out; also the Great Sit-Down Strike of 1937(can’t find a reference to that – not sure if it was the BBC production), Rosie the Riveter documentary, etc..
I’ve just written a piece lamenting the ‘sanitisation’ of coverage in the films shown at the French Film Festival in Australia, a big cultural events in Australia, early March each year.
Too many rom coms, manufactured love/family conflict stories, not enough of coverage of labour struggles, social struggles and political skulduggery, even though France is drowning in it.
The FFF 2016 did show one excellent film in the labour struggle genre – Brizé’s La loi du marché (preferably translated literally). That film deserves to go on your list.
But 2015/16 saw a slew of documentaries madein France on labour/social struggles, etc. which the FFF ignored (even though I had made suggestions to the organiser in August).
Most notably François Ruffin’s Merci Patron (which as its Wikipedia entry shows, attracted large audiences in France).
Cheers
Evan Jones
evan.jones@sydney.com.au
David Mckeown
December 26, 2018 at 7:57 am
Bisbee17 should be included in your list.
“BISBEE ’17 is a nonfiction feature film by Sundance award winning director Robert Greene set in Bisbee, Arizona, an eccentric old mining town just miles away from both Tombstone and the Mexican border.
Radically combining documentary and genre elements, the film follows several members of the close knit community as they collaborate with the filmmakers to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Bisbee Deportation, where 1200 immigrant miners were violently taken from their homes by a deputized force, shipped to the desert on cattle cars and left to die.
When the last copper mines closed in 1975, the once-booming Bisbee nearly became another Arizona ghost town, but was saved by the arrival of a generation of hippies, artists and eccentrics that give the place its strange vibe today. Bisbee is considered a tiny “blue” dot in the “red” sea of Republican Arizona, but divisions between the lefties in town and the old mining families remain. Bisbee was once known as a White Man’s Camp, and that racist past lingers in the air.
As we meet the townspeople, they begin to confront the violent past of the Deportation, a long-buried secret in the old company town. As the 100th anniversary of Bisbee’s darkest day approaches, locals dress as characters on both sides of the still-polarizing event, staging dramatic recreations of scenes from the escalating miner’s strike that lead to the Deportation. Spaces in town double as past and present; reenactors become ghosts in the haunted streets of the old copper camp.
Richard plays the sheriff in a Western, Fernando portrays a Mexican miner in a Musical, a local politician is in her own telenovela. These and other enacted fantasies mingle with very real reckonings and it all builds towards a massive restaging of the Deportation itself on the exact day of its centennial anniversary.”
Labor Film Database
January 1, 2019 at 8:12 pm
Excellent addition to our listing, Richard, thank you!