110m; U.K.
Director: Lewis Gilbert
Cast: Michael Caine, Julie Walters and Michael Williams
Synopsis: A young wife decides to complete her education and take her exams. She meets a professor who teaches her to value her own insights while still being able to beat the exams. The change in her status causes friction between her and her husband.
97m; Australia
Director: Mark Joffe
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Ben Mendelsohn and Alwyn Kurts
Synopsis (IMDB): An expert on productivity shows wacky workers in 1966 Australia how to run their moccasin factory like clockwork, despite laying off more than half the workforce.
471m
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Synopsis: West German television series on the lives of factory tool makers.
119m; U.S.
Director: John Sayles
Cast: John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, David Strathairn, Christopher Lloyd, Studs Turkel
Synopsis: A dramatization of the Black Sox scandal when the underpaid Chicago White Sox accepted bribes to deliberately lose the 1919 World Series.
103m; France
Director: Xabi Molia
Synopsis: Elsa scrapes through to the end of each month by doing odd jobs. At night, she cleans buses in a deserted coach station, during the day she looks after a child for a young couple. Hoping to land a job with a contract, she attends interviews with disastrous results. Her neighbour Mathieu is also looking for work and seems to have achieved perfection in the art of failing interviews. One day, Elsa is evicted from her flat. She finds herself faced with a life of uncertainty with only a potted plant for company. Mathieu occasionally makes her offers of love that she’s not ready to accept. The temptation to leave it all behind leads Elsa to a forest in which Mathieu has already found refuge and set up camp.
141m; U.S.
Director: Gregory Nava
Cast: Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez, David Villalpando and Ernesto Gómez Cruz
Synopsis: Mayan Indian peasants, tired of being thought of as nothing more than “brazos fuertes” (“strong arms”, i.e., manual laborers) and organizing in an effort to improve their lot in life, are discovered by the Guatemalan army. After the army destroys their village and family, a brother and sister, teenagers who just barely escaped the massacre, decide they must flee to “El Norte” (“the North”, i.e., the USA). After receiving clandestine help from friends and humorous advice from a veteran immigrant on strategies for traveling through Mexico, they make their way by truck, bus and other means to Los Angeles, where they try to make a new life as young, uneducated, and undocumented immigrants.
80m; U.S.S.R.
Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin, Mikhail Doller
Cast: Vera Baranovskaya, Aleksandr Chistyakov and Ivan Chuvelyov
Synopsis: A peasant comes to St. Petersburg to find work. He unwittingly helps in the arrest of an old village friend who is now a labor leader. The unemployed peasant is also arrested and sent to fight in World War I. After three years, he returns ready for revolution.
76m; Brazil
Director: Gustavo Steinberg
Cast: Rubens de Falco, Leonardo Medeiros, Maria Padilha, Daniela Camargo, Gisella Reiman, Lulu Pavarin, Turíbio Ruiz
Synopsis: Humorous, satirical and cleverly constructed début by Steinberg slowly but surely knots together seven stories from everyday Brazilian life. It all comes down to money, money, money: from the Indians who want to be paid for their rain dance to the politician who just can’t help winning the lottery, time and again.
Contact: Hubert Bals Fund (http://www.fimdalinha.com.br/index_en.html) / Hubert Bals Fund, bits@osfilmes.com.br
85m; U.S.
Director: Douglas Horn
Cast: D.B. Sweeney, Missi Pyle and Cedric Yarbrough
Synopsis: A 38-year old former chef starts all over again when he interviews for entry-level corporate jobs–and can’t get one.
13m; U.S.
Director: Caroline Leaf
Synopsis (IMDB): This open-ended drama is designed to trigger discussion on the subject of equal opportunities for women in the workplace and on the role of unions in securing those opportunities and eliminating discriminatory labor practices. Though set within a hospital and focusing on one of several staff women who are denied access to a pharmacy training program despite suitable qualifications, the underlying premises, conflicts, and responses have implications that reach far beyond the hospital walls
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