9m; U.S.
Director: Marty Shea
Synopsis: A 1st grader visits the school guidance counselor and must decide what she wants to be for the rest of her life.
Contact: Marty Shea 773-989-8501 tragedies@crewdocs.com
Category Archives: Drama
Poor Cow (1967)
101m; U.K.
Director: Ken Loach
Cast: Terence Stamp, Carol White and John Bindon
Synopsis (IMDB): A young woman lives a life filled with bad choices. She marries and has a child with an abusive thief at a young age who quickly ends up in prison. Left alone she takes up with his mate (another thief) who seems to give her some happiness but who also ends up in the nick. She then takes up with a series of seedy types who offer nothing but momentary pleasure. Her son goes missing and she briefly comes to grips with what is most important to her.
The Pope’s Toilet (El baño del Papa) [2007]
90m; Uruguay
Director: César Charlone, Enrique Fernández
Cast: César Troncoso, Virginia Méndez and Mario Silva
Synopsis (IMDB): In Melo, a poor Uruguayan country village near the Brazilian border, several men earn their living from contraband, mostly transported on bicycles. One of them, Beto, is getting too old for heavy freights but hopes to a earn a motorbike. The idea is to build and charge money for the use of a proper lavatory at the occasion of the first-ever papal visit to Uruguay, as is holiness is expected to pass trough Melo where he may be cheered by hordes of Catholic Brazilians.
Portrait of Teresa (Retrato de Teresa) [1979]
103m; Cuba
Director: Pastor Vega
Cast: Idalia Anreus, Miguel Benavides and Samuel Claxton
Synopsis (IMDB): Teresa is overwhelmed: with a husband, three young sons, a job as a crew leader in a textile factory, and volunteer commitments as cultural leader of her union. Her husband, Ramón, wants more of her attention; her feelings are mixed, wanting domestic peace, feeling responsibilities to the revolution, and wanting to control her own life beyond doing dirty dishes. They separate; he begins an affair. When he wants a reconciliation, she asks what his response would be if she’d had an affair too. “But men are different,” is his reply. He’s failed her test, and to hold on to independence and self-respect, she remains uncompromising and hard-edged.
Deadline for Action (1946)
40m
Director: Carl Marzani
Synopsis (WorldCat): This film analyses the post-World War II economic situation as experienced by one UE worker named Bill Turner. It focuses on the impact of the nation-wide strike in 1946 when over two million workers went out in protest over wage cutbacks. An animation sequence explains the role of multinational corporations and reveals their questionable business practices overseas during the war.
Millions of Us (1935)
17m
Directors: Slavko Vorkapich (as Jack Smith), Tina Taylor
Synopsis (BAM/PFA): The story of millions of unemployed in the soup kitchen and breadline days vs. the millions still working, personalized in the drama of a young man driven by hunger to become a scab, and whose experiences lead him to recognize his common interests with the strikers and to be converted to trade unionism.
Strike in Town (1955)
37m
Director: Leslie McFarlane
Synopsis (NFB): This short film depicts the act of collective bargaining common to Canadian industry and shows how it affected a union, a company and a community. In Strike in Town the events that led to a deadlock in negotiations between management and employees at a furniture factory are staged against the backdrop of a one-industry town. It’s the story of a strike nobody wanted, but which everyone was powerless to stop.
Website: http://www.nfb.ca/film/strike_in_town
Employee’s Entrance (1933)
75m
Director: Roy del Ruth
Synopsis (WorldCat): A pre-code film about a heartless manager of a department store who makes a penniless woman pay dearly for her job. He forbids his apprentice to marry, but the apprentice secretly marries a bride with secrets of her own.
La Belle Equipe (1936)
101m; France
Director: Julien Duvivier
Synopsis: Five unemployed workers unsuccessfully attempt to pool resources to get a music hall running.
La Bete Humiaine (1938)
90m; France
Director: Jean Renoir
Synopsis: Railroad workers and love, lust, and the murder.
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