Backed by a “free trade” agreement with the U.S., the president of Peru launched a plan to turn over indigenous Amazonian land to big corporations for mining and oil and gas extraction. Indigenous communities fought back. The filmmakers immersed themselves in this drama and produced incredible footage showing the courage and sacrifice of the native people, juxtaposed with the familiar invoking of “progress” and “the rule of the law” by the corporations’ allies in government.
A beautiful Ethiopian feature film tells the story of two characters who don’t fit into traditional rural life in that country. One is a young boy more adept at cooking than typically male tasks. The other is an outspoken teenage girl who is being drawn into local radical political debates.
United Kingdom (Director: Adam Sobel) — Inside Qatar’s labor camps, African and Asian migrant workers building the facilities of the 2022 World Cup compete in a football tournament of their own. World Premiere. DAY ONE
China (Director: Jiu-liang Wang) — Yi-Jie, an 11-year-old girl, works alongside her parents in a recycling facility while dreaming of attending school. Kun, the facility’s ambitious foreman, dreams of a better life. Through the eyes and hands of those who handle its refuse, comes an examination of global consumption and culture. International Premiere. THE NEW CLIMATE
India, Germany, Finland (Director: Rahul Jain) — This intimate, observant portrayal of the rhythm of life and work in a gigantic textile factory in Gujarat, India, moves through the corridors and bowels of the enormously disorienting structure—taking the viewer on a journey of dehumanizing physical labor and intense hardship.
Daunting descent to the underworld of a textile factory in Gujarat, in North-western India, where the cheap clothes for the first world are made. This factory represents many more from Western India, where the scenary and the conditions are like the ones we see here. Claustrophobic, hermetic, unhealthy, dark spaces, with the air saturated of toxic smoke emanated from dye chemicals. Tied to looms, sleepy teenagers, youths and mature men work twelve hours a day for starvation wages: many of them go into debt in order to pay the train ticket to travel from rural areas to the urban factories. The brutal working conditions dehumanize the workers, to the point of turning them into appendixes of machines. Landless peasants join the files of workers without rights nor holydays. Few well selected interviews to workers convey what happens here: employers oppression without any constraint from the State, lack of trade-union reply due to the killing of their leaders, no viable alternative to survive out of the factory.
Relevance: With an excellent cinematography (it gained the Price of the best documentary photography in Sundance), the film transfers a feeling of anguish without loosing artistic dignity. We roam labyrinthic corridors and stagnant rooms, and we absorb the rhythm of production through the monotonous noises from the machines. This great debut of Rahul Jain give voice and faces to some of the more sorely afflicted slaves in the twenty-first century. Note courtesy Docs and the World
U.S.A. (Director: Peter Bratt) — Dolores Huerta bucks 1950s gender conventions by co-founding the country’s first farmworkers’ union. Wrestling with raising 11 children, gender bias, union defeat and victory, and nearly dying after a San Francisco Police beating, Dolores emerges with a vision that connects her newfound feminism with racial and class justice. World Premiere (Sundance)
A new documentary about high tech, political hustle, and the future of cities.
Directors: Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman <secrets@igc.org>
“Company Town” Trailer:
“Riveting…This high minded film lets the personal stories it has uncovered speak the truth to us in a way that “disrupts the disrupters…the best kind of story-telling.”
— Steven Hill, Huffington Post
“Company Town” is a shot of political energy — a valentine to the weird and wild hurly-burly of the electoral process at the grassroots level, from where true democracy springs.”
— David Talbot, founder of Salon and bestselling author of “Season of the Witch” and “The Devil’s Chessboard”
“I was thrilled by Company Town’s virtuoso storytelling, its compassion, and the message that democracy can actually win the fight (sometimes!) against our corporate overlords.” — Josh Kornbluth, Monologuist & Filmmaker
(ReMine, El Último Movimiento Obrero, Marcos Martinez, DCP, Spain 2014, 102 min., Spanish w/subtitles)
In 2012, as global financial institutions harassed debt-ridden Spain, the government introduced crushing austerity measures, including a 63% reduction in subsidies to the coal industry. In northern Spain, a stronghold of militant trade unions, Asturian miners declared an unlimited strike, occupied mines, blockaded highways, fought police, and organized a mass protest march to Madrid, nearly 300 miles away. Across Spain and internationally, the miners’ traditional methods of struggle and organization won wide sympathy and admiration, culminating in a joyous demonstration of solidarity. Yet the future of Spanish coal mining remains in doubt.
(Der Banker, Marc Bauder, Austria/Germany 2013, 88 min., DCP, German w/subtitles)
Maybe the real masters of the universe are not politicians, armies or even nations: they are probably investment bankers like Deutsche Bank’s Rainer Voss. From a gleaming steel and glass structure in Frankfurt’s financial district, Voss offers a distinctive perspective on the out-of-control mechanics of modern global finance. He describes a parallel universe of extreme wealth and merciless pressure for profit, an opaque system that disconnects bankers from the outside world.
In “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Jordan Belfort cuts short an explanation of his work, because, he says, we probably couldn’t follow the details. “Master of the Universe” attempts that explanation but offers a sobering antidote to irrational exuberance and a psychological case study in the financier’s mind-set. This indefatigable tell-all documentary from Marc Bauder cedes the floor to Rainer Voss, a German ex-trader who tells us with clarity about how it all works. read full NYT review here
Having spent 25 years making films defending ordinary people, Moore is now one of the 100 most influential people alive according to Time Magazine. Moore now follows up Capitalism: A Love Story with Where to Invade Next, in which the formidable filmmaker tours the world to investigate what the USA could learn from other countries. Discovering that Italian workers get paid holidays and parental leave; Finland’s students have no homework; Slovenians don’t pay for university; and that Tunisian women have access to abortion, he also goes to Iceland, where women hold top governmental positions whilst (mostly male) bankers are prosecuted, in a brilliant film about people before profit.
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