Unemployed Arash wants to land a job but it’s tougher than he thinks. When he gets thrown into an odd project with only a red hoodie to keep himself warm, he starts to question what he has got himself into. Feature | 14 min | Director: Willy Fermelin | Country: Sweden | Language: English | Subtitles: English
Category Archives: A: New/Just Added
Sell
A dark comedy about a burned-out telemarketer. During a call with a customer, he must succeed in selling to save the life of his niece.
Feature | 12 min | Director: Sara Dutta | Country: Sweden | Language: Swedish | Subtitles: English
A Mother’s Body
A Mother’s Body is an intimate portrayal of two female hotel cleaners from a daughter’s perspective. While the women perform their daily work, the daughter reflects on how their profession affects their bodies and relationship to time. Meanwhile, the women navigate and negotiate the demands of the strenuous labour with experience, preciseness, and beauty.
Documentary | 8 min | Director: Jonelle Twum | Country: Sweden | Language: Swedish | Subtitles: English
American Made: Union Built
A powerful and triumphant look at the union labor movement in New York City, with a focus on construction workers and the Count Me In movement.
Documentary | 22 min | Director: Jacinta Filiaci, Spencer Santini & Jordan Valdes | Country: USA | Language: English, Spanish | Subtitles: English
Francis
Francis and nine other west Africans travel to Sweden to work as tree planters. They hope to be able to earn money for their families. Upon finally arriving they get stuck, but Francis refuses to accept the situation.
Feature | 31 min | Director: Ahmed Abdullahi | Country: Sweden | Language: English | Subtitles: Swedish
Pink Rider
An intimate and personal reflection on working conditions in the 21st century, seen through the eyes of a bike courier. From nostalgia to frustration accompanied by Swedish punk, this film deepens our understanding of the plight of all workers in the so-called gig economy.
Documentary | 12 min | Director: Daniel Aguirre | Country: Sweden | Language: Spanish | Subtitles: English
Company Town
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
Company Town
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
El Empleo
Email: donna.golden@mac.com
Film’s Website: https://vimeo.com/32966847
Film’s Director(s): Santiago ‘Bou’ Grasso
Film’s Release Date: 2008
Brief Film Description/Blurb: Animated short film: literal and metaphorical representations of work.
American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs
Distributed by First Run Features and available on Amazon and iTunes.
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 