Category Archives: 2023 Shortlist

When the last factory in a small Rust Belt town closes its doors, an unlikely hero emerges in dutiful, quiet Allery Parkes. A career employee of the factory, the aging Allery, can’t reconcile how to live a life simply sitting at home doing nothing. Against the advice and pleas of his loving wife Lola, he forms an unlikely friendship with his charismatic neighbor Walter, in order to revive the defunct factory. As their community rallies around them – and as their former corporate bosses strategize how to implode this unexpected movement – Allery learns that he might be something he never thought possible: a leader.

Film info: Drama | 109 min | Director: Robert Jury | Country: USA | Language: English | Subtitles: Swedish

It’s a fly-on-the-wall documentary about trade unions, giant corporations, globalization and local communities that depend on big corporations. Specifically, it’s the backroom fight to prevent the closure of Oshawa, Ont.’s General Motors plant in December, 2019 and the loss of 5,000 jobs. The focus is on Unifor, the national union representing the autoworkers, and the complex feelings the workers have about the plant, the union and a path forward. No one is spared in this telling. It also features an appearance by Sting who was performing in Toronto in The Last Ship, his play about the near demise of a shipbuilding town in England, when the GM crisis erupted.

Arbetar Filmfestivalen // Nordic Labour Film Festival 2021

John Gianvito assembles Keller’s political addresses and writings into a portrait of a warrior for social justice and a passionate, insightful proselytizer of Marxist thought.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13152604/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast

71 mins | 2021

Director: Tomasz Wolski

Producer: Anna Gawlita

Subtitle: English

In the days leading up to Christmas 1970, the Polish government raised the prices of food and consumer goods, prompting worker strikes and public demonstrations. In response, the Communist regime ordered the police and military to intervene and suppress the protests, which resulted in violent clashes, thousands of arrests, and the deaths of over 40 demonstrators. Director Tomasz Wolski brings the tragic sequence of decisions and their ramifications to life in a compelling and stylized pastiche of archival footage, stop-motion animation, puppetry, and recordings of government officials’ conversations. Bold and bracing, the film interweaves multiple visual styles and stories to suspenseful effect as the tension between the public and the government unfolds in black-and-white streets and moody dioramas. With chilling contemporary resonances, 1970 captures the politics of power and intimidation—how both are deployed by authority figures when they are confronted by the forces of civil unrest and a fear of their own citizens. TM

“A Feminist, Neorealist, Communist Film, and a Plain Great Movie”

Julia Garner is “magnificent” as the personal assistant to a TriBeCa-based film executive whose sexual harassment of hopeful young starlets is an open secret. The name “Weinstein” is never once uttered, and it doesn’t have to be; the writer and director, Kitty Green, uses what we already know to fill in the blanks. We don’t even see the monster in question — he’s just a presence and a voice, in snatches of overheard dialogue and muffled fits of rage, and Green’s beautifully controlled film captures, with brutal, pinpoint accuracy, how that presence infects a workplace, and what happens when someone decides not to play along.

Watch it on Hulu

2018 ‧ Drama/Crime ‧ 2h 1m
Initial release: June 8, 2018 (Japan)
Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Japanese: 万引き家族
Awards: Palme d’Or, Japan Academy Prize for Picture of the Year, MORE
Nominations: Cannes Jury Prize, Cannes Best Director Award,

On the margins of Tokyo, a dysfunctional band of outsiders is united by fierce loyalty and a penchant for petty theft. When the young son is arrested, secrets are exposed that upend their tenuous, below-the-radar existence.