Chosen by Ai Weiwei as a companion piece to his “Trace” exhibit at the Hirshhorn, is a documentary about workers’ rights in China. Shot over six years, the film depicts labor activists striving to better the lives of the country’s workers — their aims do not go over well, as they are threatened and attacked on a regular basis.
Category Archives: Genre
GHOSTS
96 min/Broomfi eld/UK/2006
Broomfield’s fictional feature film, Ghosts (2006), is based on interviews and articles gathered by the journalist Hsai-Hung Pai during her investigation into the 2004 Morecambe Bay cockling tragedy. Twenty-three undocumented migrant workers from China, all unfamiliar with the geography, language and customs of the area, were drowned after being caught out by incoming tides on the extensive mud flats of Morcambe Bay. Their deaths are dramatised in Ghosts which, whilst focusing on a single doomed work crew, is the story of workers who, in desperate need to support their families in China, resort to illegal immigration to countries such as the UK where they became part of the significant number of foreign-born precariat under-class workers. Th e cockle gatherers are representative of a signifi cant class of modern slavery, being bound to criminal gang bosses by a debt servitude that leaves them unable to escape their dangerous jobs. Broomfield deftly dramatises the process in which a Chinese worker pays smugglers a significant sum of money, before taking terrible risks (such as being transported by container), in order to enter the British workforce, where they are subsequently crowded into tiny cottages and treated akin to slaves before being sent out to work in conditions and environments that are dangerous and unsupervised.
(London Labour Film festival 2017)
WILD MOUSE [WILDE MAUS]
A music critic in midlife crisis seeks revenge on the boss who fired him in this satirical seriocomedy, the directorial debut of actor Josef Hader (THE BONEMAN, STEFAN ZWEIG: FAREWELL TO EUROPE). Unwilling to come clean about his termination, Georg (Hader) pretends to go to work each day, but instead hangs out in Vienna’s Prater amusement park, where he befriends ride operator Erich (Georg Friedrich), previously his childhood tormentor. Georg becomes increasingly attracted to Erich’s Romanian girlfriend Nicoletta (Crina Semciuc), more alienated from his therapist wife, Johanna (Pia Hierzegger) and more aggressive in his stealth harassment of his ex-boss (Jörg Hartmann). Official Selection, 2017 Berlin Film Festival. DIR/SCR Josef Hader; PROD Veit Heiduschka, Michael Katz. Austria/Germany, 2017, color, 103 min. In German and Italian with English subtitles. NOT RATED
Run Time: 103 Minutes
Genre: Dark comedy
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
U.S.A. (Director: Morgan Spurlock, Screenwriters: Jeremy Chilnick, Morgan Spurlock, Producers: Keith Calder, Jessica Calder, Spencer Silna, Nicole Barton, Jeremy Chilnick, Matthew Galkin) — Muckraking filmmaker Morgan Spurlock reignites his battle with the food industry – this time from behind the register – as he opens his own fast food restaurant. U.S. Premiere (Sundance 2018)
Video
A BETTER LIFE
(Chris Weitz, US 2011, 98 min., 35mm)
Set in contemporary East Los Angeles the film, whose plot partially parallels that of Bicycle Thief, sympathetically depicts experiences of undocumented Mexican immigrants including manual labor, schools, gangs, family, ICE and deportation. Mexican-American actor Demián Bichir received an Oscar nomination for his moving portrayal of a father who risks everything to make una vida mejor for his son.
Death in Sarajevo
Smrt u Sarajevu
DANIS TANOVIC
Bosnia & Herzegovina, 2016
85 minutes, Color
Official website
Winner of the Jury Grand Prix and the International Film Critics Award at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Death in Sarajevo is a timely drama from acclaimed Bosnian filmmaker Danis Tanovic (FFDC 2015’s Tigers, the 2001 Foreign Language Oscar®-winning No Man’s Land). At Sarajevo’s Hotel Europe, preparations are under way to host the European Union’s centenary commemorating the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip that triggered World War I, a French actor is in the Presidential Suite rehearsing the Bernard-Henri Levy play from which the hotel got its name, and a TV crew is filming local scholars discussing regional history. Manager Omer is dealing with a cash flow problem and a looming strike by workers while his assistant, Lamija, tries to keep things organized in the face of growing discord. What could possibly go wrong in the course of this highly charged history lesson?—Eddie Cockrell
In Bosnian with English subtitles
Xmas without China (2013)
Directed By: Alicia Dwyerl
Runtime: 70 min
Stars: – – –
Synopsis: Exploring the intersection of commercialism and immigration in American culture, the documentary filmmakers follow their friend and fellow filmmaker Tom Xia on an intimate, humorous journey to get to know his neighbors
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