10m; Israel/Palestine
Director: Yonatan Ben Efrat
Synopsis: Living conditions of Palestinian workers inside Israel.
Contact: http://www.hanitzotz.com/video.htm
10m; Israel/Palestine
Director: Yonatan Ben Efrat
Synopsis: Living conditions of Palestinian workers inside Israel.
Contact: http://www.hanitzotz.com/video.htm
153m; U.S.
Director: Nunnally Johnson
Cast: Gregory Peck, Jennifer Jones and Fredric March
Synopsis (IMDB): An ex-soldier faces ethical questions as he tries to earn enough to support his wife and children well.
85m; U.K.
Director: Alexander Mackendrick
Cast: Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood and Cecil Parker
Synopsis (IMDB): An altruistic chemist invents a fabric that resists wear and stain as boon to humanity but both capital and labor realize it must be suppressed for economic reasons.
165m
Director: Andrzej Wajda
Cast: Krystyna Janda, Jerzy Radziwilowicz and Tadeusz Lomnicki
Synopsis (IMDB): In 1976, a young woman in Krakow is making her diploma film, looking behind the scenes at the life of a 1950s bricklayer, Birkut, who was briefly a proletariat hero, at how that heroism was created, and what became of him. She gets hold of outtakes and censored footage and interviews the man’s friends, ex-wife, and the filmmaker who made him a hero. A portrait of Birkut emerges: he believed in the workers’ revolution, in building housing for all, and his very virtues were his undoing. Her hard-driving style and the content of the film unnerve her supervisor, who kills the project with the excuse she’s over budget. Is there any way she can push the film to completion?
153m
Director: Andrzej Wajda
Cast: Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Krystyna Janda and Marian Opania
Synopsis (IMDB): Andrzej Wajda’s account of the events at the Gdansk shipyard in the summer of 1980. Winkiel (Marian Opania), a burned-out, alcoholic journalist is assigned to look into the activities of Maciek Tomzyk (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), the charismatic and articulate leader of striking shipyard workers. He turns out to be the son of Mateusz Birkut. The journalist makes use of her own reputation as a youthful radical, implying a solidarity with Tomzyk even as she searches for the dirty laundry the party bosses hope she’ll find. But as she interviews the labour leader’s associates and his detained wife, Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda), and hears of his travails and of his father’s death in the 1970 crackdown against the workers, Opania begins to feel his former idealism returning, forcing her to consider putting her own career at risk to side with the strikers.
75m; U.S.
Director: Frank Borzage
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Loretta Young and Marjorie Rambeau
Synopsis: Love flourishes among the unemployed in a shack by New York’s East River, but our hero turns to crime when his wife becomes pregnant.
78m; U.S.
Director: Eric Eason
Cast: Leo Minaya, Jessica Morales and Franky G
Synopsis (IMDB): Fifteen years ago, their Washington Heights neighborhood was dubbed the crack-cocaine capital of the world, but today it is transforming into one of the most vibrant, Spanish-speaking communities in the United States. While the drug dealers continue to disappear, their violent legacy still casts a shadow over the neighborhood and its residents. Junior, an ex-convict struggling to get his life back on track, is a product of this legacy. His younger brother Manny, the salutatorian of his high school class, embodies the hope of the future. On the night of his graduation party, Manny finds himself faced with an ill-fated decision that could change his life forever.
80m; U.S./China
Director: Jennifer Baichwal
Synopsis (IMDB): Jennifer Baichwal’s cameras follow Edward Burtynsky (1955- ) as he visits what he calls manufactured landscapes: slag heaps, e-waste dumps, huge factories in the Fujian and Zhejiang provinces of China, and a place in Bangladesh where ships are taken apart for recycling. In China, workers gather outside the factory, exhorted by their team leader to produce more and make fewer errors. A woman assembles a circuit breaker, and women and children are seen picking through debris or playing in it. Burtynsky concludes with a visit to Shanghai, the world’s fastest growing city, where wealth and poverty, high-rises and old neighborhoods are side by side.
55m; Mexico
Director: Saul Landau & Sonia Augulo
Synopsis: Shows the real lives of workers who work in the Maquiladora’s. The Maquilas were sold to the Mexican workers as the solution to the problem of unemployment yet the maquilas have turned intoa disaster for Mexico.
Contact: http://saullandau.com/movies.html
U.S./Mexico
Director: Vicky Funari
http://www.maquilapolis.com/project_eng.htm
Synopsis: Maquiladoras, women’s issues