115m; Spain, Argentina, Italy
Director: Marcelo Piñeyro
Cast: Eduardo Noriega, Najwa Nimri and Eduard Fernández
Synopsis: Brilliant. A modern version of Rod Serling’s classic TV morality play “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” crossed with “Survivor,” white collar job applicants are put in a room and choose up sides and press their individual advantages.
Trailer
100m; France
Director: Laurent Cantet
Cast: Jalil Lespert, Jean-Claude Vallod and Chantal Barré
Synopsis: The 35-hour work week has all of France in its thrall. This film turns it into a feature about economic and familial politics. Frank, a business school graduate, returns to his provincial hometown to take a management position in the factory where his father has been working for 30 years. First Frank makes the mistake of actually asking the workers on the assembly line for their opinions. Then upper management manipulates his findings to lay off employees. This creates a huge rift, not only between labor and management, but between father and son. A human morality tale that evokes paternal and filial love, and illustrates the personal risk behind political ideas.
Full Film (in multiple parts)
110m; Japan
Director: Lee Sang-il
Cast: Yasuko Matsuyuki, Etsushi Toyokawa and Yû Aoi
Synopsis: Billy Elliot meets “Shall We Dance?” Japanese coal-mining town tries to deal with loss of jobs.
Contact: http://www.fortissimofilms.com/catalogue/title.asp?filmID=311
Trailer
70m; U.S.
Director: Stephanie Black
Synopsis: Stephanie Black has a record of making films about the real costs of economic development including Life and Debt about the economic destruction in Jamaica because of IMF policies. In H-2 worker, we learn about the real labor conditions of agricultural workers who are brought to the US and then used virtually as slave labor in the H-2 program. These workers who are brought in to Florida’s Lake Okeechobee area from Jamaica and the Caribbean are the “slave” workers of America providing great profits for the agricultural owners and misery for the workers and their families. It also is connected with the efforts in California by some leading politicians to bring back the “guest workers” program.
Contact: http://www.lifeanddebt.org/h2worker/
Trailer
96m; U.K.
Director: Ken Loach
Cast: Kierston Wareing, Juliet Ellis and Leslaw Zurek
Synopsis (IMDB): Angie gets the sack from a recruitment agency for bad behaviour in public. Seizing the chance, she teams up with her flatmate, Rose, to run a similar business from their kitchen. With immigrants desperate to work the opportunities are considerable, particularly for two girls so in tune with these times
Contact: Please feel free to show whichever of Ken’s films you feel your audience would most appreciate. You should be able to get a copy of most of them but a couple of them are dogged by convoluted rights issues with the BBC. However, the BFI and the British Council are a great source and will help you get most of the films. The best person to contact in the first instance is: Geraldine.higgins@britishcouncil.org (from “Ann Cattrall”)
Trailer
75m; U.S.
Director: Vicky Funari, Julia Query
Cast: Stephanie Batey, Darrell Davis and Julia Query
Synopsis (IMDB): Documentary look at the 1996-97 effort of the dancers and support staff at a San Francisco peep show, The Lusty Lady, to unionize. Angered by arbitrary and race-based wage policies, customers’ surreptitious video cameras, and no paid sick days or holidays, the dancers get help from the Service Employees International local and enter protracted bargaining with the union-busting law firm that management hires. We see the women work, sort out their demands, and go through the difficulties of bargaining. The narrator is Julia Query, a dancer and stand-up comedian who is reluctant to tell her mother, a physician who works with prostitutes, that she strips.
Watch Online
http://www.hulu.com/watch/362936
80m; U.K./Jamaica
Director: Stephanie Black
Cast: Michael Manley, Stanley Fischer
Synopsis: Documentary looks at the effects of neo-liberal globalization on Jamaica, including policies of the World Trade Organization and free trade zones. Features wonderful interviews with the late democratic socialist Prime Minister of Jamaica Michael Manley and narration by novelist Jamaica Kincaid.
Trailer
87m; U.S.
Contact: Ramin Bahrani
Cast: Ahmad Razvi, Leticia Dolera and Charles Daniel Sandoval
Synopsis (IMDB): A night in the life of a former Pakistani rock star who now sells coffee from his push cart on the streets of Manhattan.
Trailer
113m; Spain
Director: Fernando Leon de Aranoa
Cast: Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar and José Ángel Egido
Synopsis (IMDB): 2001: men without jobs, in the port city of Vigo. Six men worked in a shipyard, now shuttered. They pass the time at La Naval, a bar opened by one of them after the yard closed. They face their futures in makeshift ways: Rico has his bar and a sharp 15-year-old daughter, Reina has become a watchman and a moralizer, Lino fills out job applications, Amador drinks heavily and talks of his wife’s return; José is married to Ana, who works at a cannery and tires of being the breadwinner amidst José’s emasculated moodiness; Santa, the group’s conscience and troublemaker, occasionally fantasizes about Australia. In truth, all are joined like Siamese twins, adrift.
Contact: distributor: Lions Gate Films Alyssa Chinn Ph: 310 314-9597 Fax: 310 396-6041 achinn@lgecorp.com
Watch on YouTube
87m; U.S.
Director: Charlie Chaplin
Cast: Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard and Henry Bergman
Synopsis (IMDB): Chaplin’s last ‘silent’ film, filled with sound effects, was made when everyone else was making talkies. Charlie turns against modern society, the machine age, (The use of sound in films ?) and progress. Firstly we see him frantically trying to keep up with a production line, tightening bolts. He is selected for an experiment with an automatic feeding machine, but various mishaps leads his boss to believe he has gone mad, and Charlie is sent to a mental hospital… When he gets out, he is mistaken for a communist while waving a red flag, sent to jail, foils a jailbreak, and is let out again. We follow Charlie through many more escapades before the film is out.
Trailer
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 