107m; U.S.
Diector: Tony Goldwyn
Cast: Hilary Swank, Sam Rockwell and Melissa Leo
Synopsis: A working mother puts herself through law school in an effort to represent her brother, who has been wrongfully convicted of murder and has exhausted his chances to appeal his conviction through public defenders. Movie alternatively titled “Betty Anne Waters.”
101m; U.K.
Director: Gurinder Chadha
Cast: Kim Vithana, Jimmi Harkishin and Sarita Khajuria
Synopsis (IMDB): A group of women, of East Indian origin, mostly Punjabi-speaking, settled in Great Britain, decide to hire a bus and take a day off. They decide to go a beach resort. In the early hours of the morning, they gather together, and get ready for the ride on the bus. This is a day none of them will forget and some will even cherish for the rest of their lives, as events unfold, and each woman must use her individual strength to face the challenges of their life – even during an outing on the beach
U.S.
Director: Ravi Kumar
Cast: Martin Sheen, Mischa Barton and Kal Penn
Synopsis: The story follows a young rickshaw-puller in Bhopal who gets a menial job at a chemical plant, but in December of 1984 a chemical spill in India takes the lives of almost 15,000 people and injuring more than 100,000. The film follows how the industrial disaster in the city changes his life and those of others. Stories of people in India and US as they face dilemmas of life time in the months leading to the biggest Industrial disaster in human history.
Contact: Serotonin Films + (0) 207 494 8293 Dominic Norris: dominic@serotoninfilms.com 4 Great Chapel Street, London, W1F 8FD, United Kingdom
77m
Director: Ken Loach
Broadcast Date: February 19,1969
Network: BBC1
Synopsis (BFI): ‘The Big Flame’ was writer Jim Allen‘s second Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964-70), and his first with director Kenneth Loach. After ‘The Lump’ (tx. 1/2/1967), about the exploitation of casual labour in the building trade, Allen used his Marxist credentials to depict striking Liverpool dockers enacting a Communist-style system of workers’ control.
The play was filmed in Loach‘s accustomed drama-documentary format, honed on previous Wednesday Plays like ‘Up the Junction’ (tx. 3/11/1965) and ‘Cathy Come Home’ (tx. 16/11/1966). Real dockers appear, and the actors speak not well-rehearsed lines but in the disjointed, often incoherent, manner of authentic speech. It is captured on murky 16mm film, giving the picture the same quality as contemporaneous newsreel footage. Only the occasional voiceovers diverge from the apparent objectivity of this fly-on-the-wall aesthetic.
Allen‘s script is remarkably prophetic; it foreshadowed Britain’s massive industrial unrest of 1973-4 and its conclusion prefigures the explosive clash of worker and state in the miners’ strike of 1984. Although they would work together frequently, Loach considered ‘The Big Flame’ to be Allen‘s “definitive script”.
The mix of radical politics and the documentary approach proved incendiary. Anticipating controversy, the BBC postponed the play’s transmission twice. When finally screened, it was labelled a “Marxist play presented as sermon” by the Daily Mail and it rekindled the press’s vociferous interest in the ongoing debate about television drama-documentary.
Mary Whitehouse, secretary of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, complained that the play was “a blueprint for the communist takeover of the docks” and wrote to both Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Conservative leader Ted Heath to urge a review of the BBC‘s charter. The play’s subject would become all too real for Heath, who, as the next Prime Minister, presided over a period of bitter industrial conflict.
108m; Italy
Director: Giuseppe De Santis
Synopsis: Francesca and Walter are two-bit criminals in Northern Italy, and, in an effort to avoid the police, Francesca joins a group of women rice workers. She meets the voluptuous peasant rice worker, Silvana, and the soon-to-be-discharged soldier, Marco. Walter follows her to the rice fields, and the four characters become involved in a complex plot involving robbery, love, and murder
94m; U.S.
Director: Michael Curitz
Cast: Paul Muni,
Synopsis: An immigrant coal miner finds himself in the middle of a bitter labor dispute between the workers and the mine owners.
90m; Portugal
Director: Flora Gomes
Cast: Jorge Quintino Biague, Marcelo Cabral and Jacquelina Camara
Synopsis: A beautiful, intelligent and flirtatious young girl, Yonta, is secretly in love with a friend of her parents, Vicente, a hero of the war of independence. Vicente is unaware of her passion as she is of the love of a young man who sends her anonymous love letters.
132m; U.S.
Director: Tim Robbins
Cast: Hank Azaria, Rubén Blades and Joan Cusack, Bill Murray, Carey Elwes, Vanessa Redgrave
Synopsis (IMDB): In 1930s New York Orson Welles tries to stage a musical on a steel strike under the Federal Theater Program despite pressure from an establishment fearful of industrial unrest and red activity. Meanwhile Nelson Rockefeller gets the foyer of his company headquarters decorated and an Italian countess sells paintings for Mussolini.
Trailer
104m; U.S.
Director: John Wells
Cast: Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, Tommy Lee Jones, Maria Bello, Kevin Costner
Synopsis: A year in the life of three men trying to survive a round of corporate downsizing at a major company – and how that affects them, their families, and their communities.
Trailer
84m; U.S.
Director: Ramin Bahrani
Cast: ALEJANDRO POLANCO ISAMAR GONZALES ROB SOWULSKI CARLOS ZAPATA AHMAD RAZVI
Synopsis: Latino street orphan lives and works in an auto-body repair shop in a sprawling junkyard on the outskirts of Queens, New York.
Contact: Director: Ramin Bahrani raminbahrani@yahoo.com Distributor: Koch Lorber Suzanne Fedak ; Dan Sherman ; http://noruzfilms.com/films/chopshop.html Jeb Brody Big Beach 41 Great Jones St. Fifth Floor New York, NY 10012 P: 212-473-5800 F: 212-473-5805 jeb@bigbeachfilms.com
Trailer
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