38m; U.S. and Argentina
Director: Melissa Young
Synopsis: Argentinian workers run factories “recovered” from owners.
Author Archives: iwwggrandson
Armin (2007)
82m; Croatia
Director: Ognjen Svilicic
Synopsis: Ibro takes his son Armin from their small Bosnian village to Croatia to audition for a German film about the Balkan conflict.
Arsenal (1928)
70m; U.S.S.R.
Director: Alexander Dovzhenko
Synopsis: Based on an actual incident, this is a dramatic account of the Ukraine from the First World War through the February and October Revolutions, to the suppression of a workers’ revolt in 1918. Dovzhenko presents harsh, realistic scenes of Czarist brutality and war’s destruction, but his juxtapositions of the Russian workers and peasants are both impressionistic and symbolic.
Asturian-US (2007)
52m;
Director: Luis Argeo; Chip Hitchcock
Synopsis: The town of Arnao (Asturias province, northern Spain) grew under the wing of the Royal Mining Company. After the closure of its mine and the limitations of its factory at the beginning of the 20th century, many of its employees immigrated to similar factories located far from the sea, at the foot of the mountains of West Virginia. Several new towns were created: Spelter and Anmoore. 90% of their population was Asturians. Luis Argeo traveled from Spain in spring 2006 to document the community with the assistance of Chip Hitchcock of WBPBS.
Contact: Luis Argeo” argeol@hotmail.com http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Luis+Argeo&search=Search
At Home in Utopia (2008)
133m; U.S.
Director: Michal Goldman
Synopsis (IMDB): During the economic boom of the 1920s, thousands of immigrant Jewish factory workers managed to build the house of their dreams, a cooperative apartment complex at the edge of Bronx Park. Then they were hit by the Great Depression. At Home in Utopia bears witness to an epic social experiment across two generations in the Coops – a place known as “little Moscow” – where people tried to change the American dream into one that included racial justice and workers’ rights.
Contact: Michal Goldman Michalman@aol.com Filmmakers Collaborative 397 Moody Street Waltham MA 02453 T 781 647-1102 F 781 647-1140
See It Now: Automation (June 9, 1957)
82m
Broadcast Date: June 9, 1957
Network: CBS
Synopsis (WorldCat): Filmed exploration of how automation was changing the way America worked and how computers and automatic machines were revolutionizing industry, including the replacement of workers by machines. Includes interviews with Walter Reuther, then president of the UAW and vice-president of the AFL-CIO, Thomas J. Watson Jr., then head of IBM, and others. An in-depth exploration of the beginning of the age beyond the Industrical Revolution. [With Edward Murrow]
The Awful Truth (1999-2000)
24 episodes; U.S.
Director: Michael Moore
Synopsis: Activist film director Micheal Moore hosts a show where he continues his crusade to expose wrongdoing by the high and mighty.
Bloody Mondays and Strawberry Pies (2008)
87m
Director: Coco Schrijber
Synopsis (Boston Globe): The Dutch filmmaker Coco Schrijber has handcrafted a rapturous, often profound visual essay about the metaphysics of time – about how we spend our lives fleeing from the silence of existence by filling our days with busy-ness. It’s a film to come back and touch in your thoughts for quite a while.
Using fluid pacing and some lovely visual rhyme schemes, Schrijber circles around a handful of subjects. A young German woman named Lena works at a baked-goods factory, glazing strawberry tarts and pensively wondering if this is where she’ll spend the next 30 years. There are interviews with 101-year-old Wall Street legend Irving Kahn and Nancy Wake, a dashing WWII British spy who is now an infirm 96. They have lived great lives that each acknowledges is turning to dust in the end.
With patience and surprisingly few pretensions, in fact, “Bloody Mondays’’ builds a case for boredom as a necessary antechamber to spiritual grace. It is the place where we can, if we’re willing, begin to contemplate everything we devote entire lives working to avoid: our coming deaths, our present purposes, and so on and so on, into the painter’s tireless blue infinite.
Backyard / El traspatio (2009)
122m; Mexico
Director: Carlos Carrera
Synopsis: The true story of the border town of Juarez, Mexico where since the mid-90’s thousands of women have gone missing or turned up as sun-burnt corpses in the desert. Can new police captain Blanca Bravo stop the savagery?
Bad About Being Korean
7m;
Director: Elissa Moon
Synopsis: Filmmaker’s personal experience of child labor in a family dry-cleaning business
Cast: Jennifer McNulty (831) 459-2495; jmcnulty@ucsc.edu
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