Author Archives: siddawson

Directed by: Lee Grant
Running Time: 50 min
Starring: N/A

Website: http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0108

Synopsis: The Willmar 8 is Academy Award winner Lee Grant’s documentary about working women which has been featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, excerpted on 60 Minutes, and was broadcast nationally by PBS. The film tells the story of eight unassuming, apolitical women in America’s heartland–Willmar, Minnesota–who were driven by sex discrimination at work to take the most unexpected step of their lives and found themselves in the forefront of the struggle for women’s rights. Risking jobs, friends, family and the opposition of church and community, they began the longest bank strike in American history in a dramatic attempt to assert their own equality and self-worth

Directed by: G eorge Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock
Running Time: 88 min
Starring: N/A

Website: http://www.der.org/films/uprising-of-34.html

Synopsis: The Uprising of ’34 is a startling documentary which tells the story of the General Strike of 1934, a massive but little-known strike by hundreds of thousands of Southern cotton mill workers during the Great Depression. The mill workers’ defiant stance — and the remarkable grassroots organizing that led up to it — challenged a system of mill owner control that had shaped life in cotton mill communities for decades. Sixty years after the government brutally suppressed the strike, a dark cloud still hangs over this event, spoken of only in whispers if at all.

Through the voices of those on all sides, The Uprising of ’34 paints a rare portrait of the dynamics of life in mill communities, offering a penetrating look at class, race, and power in working communities throughout America and inviting the viewer to consider how those issues affect us today. The film raises critical questions about the critical role of history in making democracy work today.

Directed by: Dianne Griffin and Erica Jordan
Running Time: 57 min
Starring: N/A

Website: http://www.paintednailsmovie.com/

Synopsis: The cosmetic industry is one of the fastest growing in the US, and health regulations for it are almost non-existent. This puts at risk the over 80% of licensed US manicurists who are Vietnamese immigrants, Van Nguyen included. The salon Van owns with her husband feels like a second home, but she is hesitant for her daughter to spend time there, fearing the adverse effects of product chemicals. Van herself suffers from headaches, memory loss, and has had trouble bringing other pregnancies to term, but continues to work morning until night every day. Determined to make her salon a safer place, Van takes her story to Washington D.C. and becomes one of the first to testify for safe cosmetics in over 30 years. Replete with tender yet insightful moments, Painted Nails strips the polish from an issue that touches everyone.

Directed by: Elizabeth Barret
Running Time: 58 min
Starring: N/A

Website: https://www.appalshop.org/store/appalshop-films/long-journey-home/

Synopsis: Long Journey Home explores the ethnic diversity of the Appalachian region, the economic forces causing people to migrate into and out of the area, and the choices individuals make to stay, to leave, and to come back. European immigrants recall the ethnic variety that existed in Appalachia during the first coal boom of the 1910s and ’20s. African-Americans whose families left sharecropping in the South to build the railroads and work in the mines talk about the transition to life in the coal camps, and their later dispersal across the country as automation took their jobs.