120m; U.K.
Director: John Willis & Peter Jones
Synopsis: A broadcast highlighting health and safety concerns affecting factory workers. Alice is 47. She worked in an asbestos factory when young. She now suffers from mesothelioma, an asbestos caused cancer. She fights for her life and her rights.
98m; U.S.
Director: Louis Malle
Cast: Amy Madigan, Ed Harris, Ho Nguyen
Synopsis (IMDB): A despondent Vietnam veteran in danger of losing his livelihood is pushed to the edge when he sees Vietnamese immigrants moving into the fishing industry in a Texas bay town.
128m; U.S.
Director: Daniel Petrie
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil , Ruby Dee
Synopsis (IMDB): A substantial insurance payment could mean either financial salvation or personal ruin for a poor black family.
These are the films in the 2nd annual doxita: China’s Wild West (UK, Urszula Pontikos, 10 min.) Breadmakers (UK, Yasmin Fedda, 11 min.) Wood (USA, David Fenster, 21 min.) Shika Shika (USA, Stephen Hyde, 10 min.) The Tailor (Spain, Oscar Perez, 31 min. )
http://www.doxita.org/ info@docuphilemedia.com
Amber is a film & photography collective in the U.K. incorporating Amber Films, Side Gallery and Side Cinema…The work is rooted in social documentary, built around long term engagements with working class and marginalized communities in the North of England. Through the gallery and cinema programs and at festivals and screenings, the group makes connections with inspirational production in the wider world. There is an integrated approach to production (which includes documentaries, dramas and photographic projects), publication (including exhibitions, books, DVDs and works created specially for the web) and distribution (though the odds sometimes seem to be stacked against it).
The approach is celebratory, even when the marginalization of lives and landscapes makes this more difficult. Production grows out of the relationships with these communities, and our creativity is inseparable from that of the people with whom Amber works. In any project, the first commitments are to individual lives, a particular landscape, or a set of concerns. The stories always emerge, opening up more ambiguities and possibilities than you can shake a stick at.
Rooted in practical craft skills (camera work, direction, editing, sound, etc), there is an egalitarian, collective approach to the film making. Technological innovation has made the different processes ever more democratically accessible, and Amber has taken advantage of this to extend its on-going experiment in collective creativity. Photography is necessarily about individual vision, and this can provide a healthy tension within the work, but Amber importantly provides a context for photographers, whether they are members of the collective or commissioned by the group. Everybody has a voice in all of the group’s activities, from the gallery and cinema programmers to the menus in the café, from the film projects to the photographic production. At the same time, the group abides by the dictum: Whoever paints the wall chooses the colour.
Amber’s approaches and concerns are best explored, looking at the work it continues to produce, commission and collect. The website is a constantly expanding educational resource, aimed at allowing you to explore the connections between the different strands.
60m; U.S.
Director: Nina Rosenblum
Synopsis (IMDB): Documentary about early 20th-century photographer Lewis Hine, who helped to expose grim working conditions in American factories and mines, especially the abuse and exploitation of children by their employers. Later, he became the official photographer for the construction of the Empire State Building
30m; U.S.
Director: Jason Blalock
Synopsis: In the 1980s, a bloody civil war between the socialist Sandinista government and US-backed Contras ravaged Nicaragua. Despite the danger, thousands of Americans disobeyed White House warnings and traveled to this Central American nation, determined to lend their skills and labour to the revolutionary Sandinista cause. Blalock tells the story of a small group of controversial U.S engineers who went further than anyone expected, and paid the ultimate price.
Contact: http://www.american-sandinista.com/ jcblalock@gmail.com
89m; U.S.
Directors: Leslie and Andrew Cockburn
Synopsis: Tells the compelling story of the housing and financial crisis. It systematically explains what happened with the banks gambling with, and profiting from, other people’s investments, then the film walks through the housing crisis through the stories of specific people that it affected by fraudulent and discriminatory lending practices perpetrated on them. The documentary backs up to the system’s problems of credit default swaps/hedge funds and the role of the insurance companies and their bailout, and ends with the community and health and human problems this has created for the society as a whole.
Contact: Andrew Cockburn amcockburn@gmail.com
98m; U.S.
Director: Barbara Kopple
Synopsis (IMDB): Chronicles the six-month strike at Hormel in Austin, Minnesota, in 1985-86. The local union, P-9 of the Food and Commercial Workers, overwhelmingly rejects a contract offer with a $2/hour wage cut. They strike and hire a New York consultant to manage a national media campaign against Hormel. Despite support from P-9’s rank and file, FCWU’s international disagrees with the strategy. In addition to union-company tension, there’s union-union in-fighting. Hormel holds firm; scabs, replacement workers, brothers on opposite sides, a union coup d’état, and a new contract materialize. The film asks, was it worth it, or was the strike a long-term disaster for organized labor? Won the Oscar in 1990 for Best Documentary.
90m; U.S.
Director: Chris Smith
Synopsis (Wikipedia): American Job is a narrative film about Randy Scott (Randy Russell), a youth caught in the dismal confusion of living and working in the world of minimum wage. The film follows Randy through a number of low-paying, menial jobs including fast food dishwasher, custodian, telemarketer, and factory worker. It highlights the sheer boredom of minimum wage work and is a slightly comical and occasionally depressing look at what life is like in the US minimum wage arena.
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 