Director: Catherine Capellaro and Andrew Rohn
Contact: andrew rohn rohn@chorus.net http://www.laborfest.net or http://home.collegeclub.com/tempslave/tshome.html or Labor Video Project, 415-282-1908 lvpsf@labornet.org
Category Archives: Genre
Teachers (1984)
107m; U.S.
Director: Arthur Hiller
Cast: Nick Nolte, JoBeth Williams and Judd Hirsch, Morgan Freeman, Laura Dern
Synopsis (IMDB): A teacher overcomes his frustration in a high-school full of flunkies. As he attempts to educate his students, his attempts to help them gets him into trouble with the school board, which only adds to his problems. With the support of his students he beats the school board and his frustration.
Texas Gold (2008)
21m; U.S.
Director: Carolyn M. Scott
Cast: Peter Coyote, Kinnu Krishnaveni and Patsy Northcutt
Synopsis (IMDB): Portrait of Diane Wilson, local shrimper turned activist in Seadrift, Texas, along Highway 185 where giant petrochemical companies make Calhoun County the nation’s most polluting. Wilson has engaged in hunger strikes seeking changes in companies’ behavior, and she has embarrassed Dow/Union Carbide by entering their plant and hanging a banner from atop a tower. We meet a neighbor, see the vacant Seadrift main street (the fishing industry is virtually gone), and hear from talking heads about Texas’s environmental policies since George W. Bush was governor. We see Wilson’s mock commercial for “Texas Gold,” the local undrinkable water. Wilson remains cheerful and tough.
The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru) [1960]
151m; Japan
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Cast: Toshirô Mifune, Masayuki Mori and Kyôko Kagawa
Synopsis: A 1960 film directed by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. It was the first film to be produced under Kurosawa’s own independent production company. The film stars Toshirō Mifune as a young man who gets a prominent position in a corrupt postwar Japanese company in order to expose the men responsible for his father’s death. It is Kurosawa’s unofficial Hamlet, reportedly the director’s favourite Shakespeare play. It also doubles as a critique of corporate corruption. Koichi Nishi (Toshirō Mifune) wants revenge for his father’s death. Nishi is a complex man, playing the troubled Hamletesque character, who lets his father’s past destroy his own future. Nishi is the easiest character to draw parallels with Shakespeare’s play. Nishi seeks to avenge the unnatural death of his father. Maysayuki Mori’s performance as the evil Iwabuchi resembles Claudius. The only other clearly corresponding character between Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well and Hamlet is Horatio with Nishi’s accomplice. Nevertheless, the underlying themes of circumstance, revenge, and justice, connect the film and play. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_Sleep_Well
The Battle of the Rails / La bataille du rail
85m; France
Director: René Clément
Cast: Marcel Barnault, Jean Clarieux and Jean Daurand
Synopsis: A story about French railroad workers who were part of organized resistance during the German WW2 occupation
The Best Typist in the World (El Mejor Mecanógrafo del Mundo) (2005)
18m
Director: Rafa Piqueras
Since he was a child, Ernesto Casanova always knew that he would be the best typist in the World. We’re in the 70’s, he’s 35 years old and he works for a lawyer’s office as a typist. He’s secretly in love with the office’s secretary. Life flows in a pleasent routine, but one day, Mr. Robledo, the boss, decides to introduce the technologic renovation in the office and he buy a new computer. Casanova thinks that this is the end.
The Big Sell Out (2007)
94m; Germany
Director: Florian Optiz
Synopsis: This film exposes the role of the IMF and World Bank by showing the effect of their policies on the lives of working people from around the world. They include an UK RMT railroad activist fighting to protect the UK railroad system, a Bolivian community activists fighting water privatization and a South African activist fighting to keep the lights on in Soweto which leads to a fight against the ANC government. This international film draws the connection of the policies of global capitalism of privatization and deregulation to the destruction of public services and the ruination of the environment and the people of the world.
Contact: Florian Opitz is a freelance documentary filmmaker, author and journalist. He was born in Saarbrücken, Germany in 1973. Since 1998 he has been working as a freelance filmmaker and journalist for several European TV stations, including for ARD, ARTE and ZDF. His work includes numerous political and historical documentaries, such as the made-for-TV features Tibet – Myth and Reality (Tibet – Mythos und Wirklichkeit, 2001) and Arabs – History of a Perceived Enemy (Die Araber – Geschichte eines Feindbildes, 2003).
flopitz@spring-productions.de http://www.thebigsellout.org
The Boss of it All (2006)
99m; Denmark
Director: Lars von Trier
Cast: Jens Albinus, Peter Gantzler and Friðrik Þór Friðriksson
Synopsis: “It’s a comedy and harmless,” is how Von Trier introduces this film, described by one reviewer as “ ‘The Office’ Viewed Through the Looking Glass.” In this dark satire, filmed entirely in an office, an out-of-work actor, hired by the director of a Danish IT company to impersonate its non-existent CEO, bumbles through meetings with senior employees and negotiations with an Icelandic businessman who wants to buy the firm. The film’s off-kilter visual style (a computer randomly determined when to tilt, pan or zoom the camera) works in the film’s favor, uncannily echoing the nonsense and frustration of our everyday lives. (Rochester Labor Film Series 2010)
The Price of Sugar (2006)
90m; U.S.
Director: Bill Haney
Synopsis (IMDB): On the Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic, tourists flock to pristine beaches, with little knowledge that a few miles away thousands of dispossessed Haitians are under armed guard on plantations harvesting sugarcane, most of which ends up in US kitchens. Cutting cane by machete, they work 14 hour days, 7 days a week, frequently without access to decent housing, electricity, clean water, education, healthcare or adequate nutrition. The Price of Sugar follows a charismatic Spanish priest, Father Christopher Hartley, as he organizes some of this hemisphere’s poorest people, challenging the powerful interests profiting from their work. This film raises key questions about where the products we consume originate, at what human cost they are produced and ultimately, where our responsibility lies.
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