26 min, USA/India, 2014
Dir. Natasha Raheja
Iconic and ubiquitous, thousands of manhole covers dot the streets of New York City. Enlivening the everyday objects around us, this short film is a glimpse of the working lives of the men behind the manhole covers in New York City.
Natasha Suresh Raheja nraheja@nyu.edu
88 min | 30 July 2015 (Argentina)
A series of seven vignettes about different people dealing with their every day problems in modern day Iran, that are loosely related to each other.
Director: Rakhshan Bani-Etemad
Writers: Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Farid Mostafavi
Stars: Habib Rezaei, Mohammad Reza Forutan, Mehraveh Sharifinia
85 min | Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy | 5 June 2015 (USA)
Director: Craig Goodwill
Writers: Christopher Bond, Jessie Gabe (story)
Stars: Zoie Palmer, Julian Richings, Rob Ramsay
In Patch Town’s dark modern fairy tale, newborn babies are plucked from cabbage patches, turned into plastic dolls, and sold as playthings in a nightmarish, oppressive society. Jon (Rob Ramsay), a discontented factory worker slaving away on a baby-harvesting production line, uncovers a secret from his past that sends him searching for his long-lost mother (Zoie Palmer). As Jon embarks on his journey with his loving wife Mary (Stephanie Pitsiladis), the sinister Child Catcher (Julian Richings) and his diminutive beet-munching henchman (Ken Hall) throw a wrench into his plans. An eye-popping fantasy-adventure, quirky comedy, and rousing musical rolled into one, Patch Town “combines Soviet-era iconography, Eastern European folklore and Western consumer-culture critique with a dash of song and dance” (Peter Debruge, Variety).
The director Craig Goodwill’s musical fairy tale, inspired by Eastern European folklore, features vivified toys that revolt against an unscrupulous corporate overlord.
– NYT review
by Harun Farocki. It is about life in an architecture studio directed by two people and follows the evolution of several projects at different levels of preparation.
Belgium
dir. Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne
in French with English subtitles
Filmed for television in 1982, this series of intimate portraits of Polish immigrants living in Belgium marks the beginning of the Dardennes’ interest in the lives of immigrants.
1980
52 min
dir. Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Looking back to the momentous events of Belgium’s general strike in 1960, the film focuses on the efforts of Edmond G. and colleagues at the Cockerill steel plant in Seraing to organise and secretly publish a workers’ newspaper between 1961 and 1969.
Director: Rahul Roy
English (subtitled), 78 min, 2003, India
http://magiclanternmovies.in/film/city-beautiful
Sunder Nagri (Beautiful City) is a small working class colony on the margins of India’s capital city, Delhi. Most families residing here come from a community of weavers. The last ten years have seen a gradual disintegration of the handloom tradition of this community under the globalisation regime. The families have to cope with change as well as reinvent themselves to eke out a living.
Radha and Bal Krishan are at a critical point in their relationship. Bal Krishan is underemployed and constantly cheated. They are in disagreement about Radha going out to work. However, through all their ups and downs they retain the ability to laugh.Shakuntla and Hira Lal hardly communicate. They live under one roof with their children but are locked in their own sense of personal tragedies.
Rahul is a noted documentary filmmaker who has widely worked on the issues of labor and gender in India. His film The City Beautiful masterfully depicts the life of two families in an Indian working-class colony, focussing on the decline of traditional handloom industry because of globalization. His recent work The Factory (2015) is about the struggle of Maruti automobile workers in New Delhi. For more than two years, 147 workers from the Maruti Suzuki plant were kept behind bars without bail or any charge sheet being presented to the defence counsel. Rahul has followed their crisis and struggle from 2013 to 2015. Read more about the film in this Indian Express piece.
Director contact info: rahulroy63@gmail.com
Director: Katharine Round
Running time: 75min
Country: UK
Year: 2015
Inspired by best-selling book The Spirit Level, Katharine Round’s film highlights the widening gulf between rich and poor. Exploring the reasons behind the ever-increasing wealth gap, its impact, and how inequality might even spell trouble for the rich, The Divide is a timely and prescient piece of globetrotting documentary cinema; both a think piece and a powerful warning.
http://raindancefestival.org/features-2014/traceable/
This documentary examines the fashion industry process, and its conscience, from a designers’ perspective.
This environmental documentary has a powerful ethical story to tell and makes even the most exhausted eye-rollers sit up and listen.
The 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh put faces on the term ‘garment factory workers’. With this as a backdrop, ‘Traceable’ looks at the local communities behind clothing industries that have retained distinctive crafts for generations. ‘Traceability’ is the aim to have a proper trail for every single step in the supply chain. As well as where, it wants consumers to be concerned with how garments are made. Thousands of hands in the process go untraceable because many farmers, seamstresses and printers simply do not have the technology to be contacted by email or phone.
Director Jennifer Sharpe follows Laura Seigel, a young designer fighting to connect the design world with anonymous artisans. Most designers do not have the time or enough commitment to nurture a direct relationship with the people who make their clothes. This documentary is partly anthropological, as Seigel designs with the creators hand-to-hand and negotiates with them on their own turf. Without being patronising or naive, ‘Traceable’ captures equal and harmonious working partnerships.
Precious Memories has one act, 84 minutes long. I wrote the script but not the songs, which are by Sarah Ogan Gunning (“I Hate the Capitalist System”); her brother Jim Garland (“I Don’t Want Your Millions Mister,” the real point of which is that we do); and her half-sister Aunt Molly Jackson (“I Am A Union Woman”), plus two traditional ballads and excerpts from three gospel songs.
THE PLAY: Part memory play, part eulogy, part concert, this one-woman show written by legendary folk singer and community organizer Si Kahn traces the life of Sarah Ogan Gunning, an unsung hero of American folk/labor music history. The play finds Sarah alone in her Detroit basement apartment on the evening after her sister Aunt Molly Jackson’s funeral, as she attempts to set the record straight and say goodbye. Although Sarah Ogan Gunning is a name almost unknown to us today, her powerful songs about the coal mining region of Eastern Kentucky in the 1930’s were an influence on Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and other famous folk singers of her day.
Si Kahn <sikahn36@gmail.com
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