by Lester Balog. This historic footage shows the 1941 San Francisco Labor Day march and the 1941 hotel workers’ strike. Screened (with “SF Labor on the March”) at the 2003 San Francisco LaborFest.
Category Archives: Documentary
Shattering the Silences: The Case for Minority Faculty
86m
Shattering the Silences: The Case for Minority Faculty offers everyone in higher education an unprecedented opportunity to see American campuses through the eyes of minority faculty.
Across America campus diversity is under attack; affirmative action programs are banned, ethnic studies departments defunded, multicultural scholarship impugned. Even so, faculty of color remain less than 9.2% of all full professors and minority student enrollment is dropping for the first time in 30 years.
Shattering the Silences cuts through the rhetoric of the current Culture Wars by telling the stories of eight pioneering scholars – African American, Latino, Native American and Asian American. As we watch them teach, mentor and conduct research, we realize in concrete terms how a diverse faculty enriches and expands traditional disciplines and contributes to a more inclusive campus environment.
available from California NewsReel
Struggles in Steel: The Fight for Equal Opportunity (1996)
58m; U.S.
Director: Tony Buba, Raymond Henderson
Cast: Raymond Henderson, Dennis C. Dickerson and Katrina Heiss
Synopsis (IMDB): This documentary tells the forgotten story of the African-American struggle for equality in the U.S. steel industry (based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). In a series of interviews intermixed with archival footage and stills, we learn how these workers faced and overcame discrimination that came from white workers, the big steel companies, and even from their own unions.
Salesman (1969)
91m; U.S.
Director: David and Albert Maysles
Synopsis: This landmark documentary follows four Boston bible salesmen as they struggle to make a living in the cutthroat world of door-to-door sales. The film follows the salesmen as they wheedle, connive and cajole their way into homes and wallets. As the pressure of the job bears down, the film reveals the dark underside of the American Dream.
Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags (2009)
75m; U.S.
Director: Marc Levin
Synopsis: Schmatta documents the current post-crash economy. We hear from freshly unemployed workers who put on a brave face, preserve their humour and try to make sense of the changing landscape. The shops stemming off Seventh Avenue that once hummed with sewing machines are being converted for upscale renters. If this gargantuan industry can be reduced to such a fraction, what does it mean for the rest of us?
Land of Destiny (2010)
78m; U.S.
Director: Brett Story
Synopsis: A hard-working petrochemical town is rocked by revelations that its workers suffer an epidemic of cancers. But even more terrifying is the looming spectre of deindustrialization and joblessness. In the rich fabric of the city’s landscape – rows of boarded storefronts, the bright sprawl of petrochemical plants and the swollen rooms of hospital wards and crowded bars – one finds a microcosm of the 21st century. Tattooed men serving fries, basement musicians, boilermakers and volunteer firemen, heartbroken widows and an optimistic mayor – the lives of a diverse medley of characters intersect to reveal the dramas and contradictions of an industrial town out of sync with a post-industrial world. As the dystopian architecture of the petrochemical plants, squatted like crushed space stations just meters away from homes and schoolyards, give way to the spaces that make this city a community, we begin to see what it is that everyone seems so afraid to lose. A portrait of a working-class city in paralysis and a mediation on work and place in the modern economy, Land of Destiny offers a poignant and universal story about work, community, and struggle in an era of globalization.
Contact: http://www.bunburyfilms.com/films/trailer/doc/lod.html
Land, Rain, and Fire (2006)
28m; Mexico
Director: Tami Gold
What began as a teacher’s strike in May of 2006 against privatization and for better wages and more resources for students, erupted into a massive movement for profound social change in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Government repression brought even greater popular resistance, which ultimately brought the state government to a standstill.
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 