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Category Archives: Genre

The Awful Truth (1999-2000)

24 episodes; U.S.

Director: Michael Moore

Synopsis: Activist film director Micheal Moore hosts a show where he continues his crusade to expose wrongdoing by the high and mighty.

 

Bloody Mondays and Strawberry Pies (2008)

87m

Director: Coco Schrijber

Synopsis (Boston Globe): The Dutch filmmaker Coco Schrijber has handcrafted a rapturous, often profound visual essay about the metaphysics of time – about how we spend our lives fleeing from the silence of existence by filling our days with busy-ness. It’s a film to come back and touch in your thoughts for quite a while.

Using fluid pacing and some lovely visual rhyme schemes, Schrijber circles around a handful of subjects. A young German woman named Lena works at a baked-goods factory, glazing strawberry tarts and pensively wondering if this is where she’ll spend the next 30 years. There are interviews with 101-year-old Wall Street legend Irving Kahn and Nancy Wake, a dashing WWII British spy who is now an infirm 96. They have lived great lives that each acknowledges is turning to dust in the end.

With patience and surprisingly few pretensions, in fact, “Bloody Mondays’’ builds a case for boredom as a necessary antechamber to spiritual grace. It is the place where we can, if we’re willing, begin to contemplate everything we devote entire lives working to avoid: our coming deaths, our present purposes, and so on and so on, into the painter’s tireless blue infinite.

 
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Posted by on January 24, 2012 in Arts/Culture, Documentary, Philosophy

 

Backyard / El traspatio (2009)

122m; Mexico

Director: Carlos Carrera

Synopsis: The true story of the border town of Juarez, Mexico where since the mid-90’s thousands of women have gone missing or turned up as sun-burnt corpses in the desert. Can new police captain Blanca Bravo stop the savagery?

 
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Posted by on January 24, 2012 in Drama, Whistleblowers, Women, Working Class

 

Bad About Being Korean

7m; 

Director: Elissa Moon

Synopsis: Filmmaker’s personal experience of child labor in a family dry-cleaning business

Cast: Jennifer McNulty (831) 459-2495; jmcnulty@ucsc.edu

 
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Posted by on January 24, 2012 in Documentary, Women

 

Joe Hill (1971)

117m; Sweden

Director: Bo Widerberg

Synopsis: A 1971 biopic about Swedish-American labor activist Joe Hill, born Joel Emanuel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden. It was directed by Bo Widerberg and depicts Hill’s involvement with the Industrial Workers of the World(IWW) union, and his trial for murder during which he defends himself. It won the Jury Prize at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.[1]

The film has been unavailable commercially for many years, but a digitally remastered version is currently in preparation. It is due for release later in 2015.

 
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Posted by on January 24, 2012 in Drama

 

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Balseros (2002)

120m; Spain

Director: Carles Bosch, Josep Maria Domènech

Synopsis: The story of Cuban refugees who risked their lives in homemade rafts to reach the United States, and what life is like for those who succeed.

 

 
 

Bamako (2006)

115m; France

Director: Abderrahmane Sissako

Synopsis (IMDB): Melé is a bar singer, her husband Chaka is out of work and the couple is on the verge of breaking up… In the courtyard of the house they share with other families, a trial court has been set up. African civil society spokesmen have taken proceedings against the World Bank and the IMF whom they blame for Africa’s woes.

 
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Posted by on January 24, 2012 in Drama

 

Bananas (2009)

80m; Sweden

Director: Fredrik Gertten

Synopsis: The human cost of banana cultivation is revealed in this documentary chronicling the case of Nicaraguan laborers, represented by L.A. attorney Juan Dominguez, against the companies who they believe poisoned them with pesticides.

Contact: International Sales: Peter Jager, peter@autlookfilms.com Phone: +43 720 34 69 34 film@wgfilm.com David Magdael & Associates – Los Angeles Winston Emano, wemano@tcdm-associates.com David Magdael, dmagdael@tcdm-associates.com Phone: +1 213 624 7827 http://www.bananasthemovie.com/

 
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Posted by on January 24, 2012 in Documentary, Farm & Food, Safety & Health

 

Bang the Drum Slowly (1973)

96m

Director: John Hancock

Synopsis: The story of the friendship between a star pitcher, wise to the world, and a half-wit catcher, as they cope with the catcher’s terminal illness through a baseball season.

 
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Posted by on January 24, 2012 in Drama, Sports

 

Barack Obama walks a day in the shoes of SEIU member Pauline Beck (2008)

3:48; U.S.

Synopsis: SEIU pioneered an initiative in which all political candidates seeking SEIU endorsement is required to spend a day with an SEIU member at work and at home with their families.During the 2008 election, now President Barack Obama walked a day in the shoes of Pauline Beck, an SEIU member and homecare provider from California.

Contact: Jennifer Wynter jennifer-wynter.philis@seiu.org