A collection of Canadian archival films, this is a website for anyone with an interest in history. For educators, these are innovative, accessible sources of history and tools for teaching. These century-old films cover a wide range of subjects and were highly popular in the era they were made. Both documentaries and narrative films are featured on this site. The former provides details about work and workplaces or important societal changes. Narrative films feature moral lessons that tell us much about attitudes and social values.
Sample titles:
Old Logging Mills 1930 (8:34)
Miners in the Making 1922 (9:49)
Life in a Mining Camp 1921 (3:35)
Read more: Canada’s Early Industrial Films are Useful to Labor and Social Historians
Category Archives: Construction Trades
THE MOVING PAST
LOGAN LUCKY
2017; PG-13; 1h 58m
Two brothers attempt to pull off a heist during a NASCAR race in North Carolina.
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: Jules Asner
Stars: Channing Tatum; Adam Driver; Daniel Craig
Working Class Heroes (2022) Original title: Heroji radnicke klase
1h 25m
A group of illegal construction workers, left without money and basic rights, fight their bosses with all they have left, building a hoax “Potemkin’s village” to con a development fund. Close to deadline it’s a fight for life and death.
- Director
- Writers
- Stars
Life on the Line
2015 ‧ Drama/Action ‧ 1h 37m
After a family tragedy, Beau Ginner rises to be foreman in a Texas lineman team, upgrading overhead power cables and preventing disasters. However, there is friction when his college-bound niece Bailey’s on-off boyfriend Duncan joins the crew, while another new recruit is hiding PTSD symptoms.
Release date: 2016 (USA)
Director: David Hackl
Music composed by: Jeff Toyne
Executive producers: Chad Dubea, Rosa Morris Peart, Shawn Williamson, Bryant Pike, Jamie Goehring
Producers: Phillip Glasser, Marvin Peart
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/movies/life-on-the-line-review-john-travolta-kate-bosworth.html
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/life-on-the-line-2016
Solidarity
Film about the construction industry blacklist in the UK.
Directed by Lucy Parker
2019; 75 mins
SOLIDARITY is about the secretive methods used against UK activists and trade unionists. Blacklisted construction workers and activists spied on by the police share their ongoing struggles.
Blacklisting in the UK construction industry impacted thousands of workers who were labelled ‘troublemakers’ for speaking out and secretively denied employment. Activists uncovered alarming links between workplace blacklisting and undercover policing. SOLIDARITY attentively follows meetings between activists and law students, brought together for the film, revealing the determination of a community working together to find a route to justice.
The first feature length film from artist filmmaker Lucy Parker, Solidarity has been made alongside and features members of Blacklist Support Group, core participants in Undercover Policing Inquiry, and members of other campaigning groups including Voice of Domestic Workers, Cleaners and Allied Independent Workers Union, Independent Workers of Great Britain, GMB, RMT, Unite British Airways Mixed Fleet, County Durham Teaching Assistants, BECTU Picturehouse and many individual trade unionists.
Funded by Arts Council England, Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust, Lipman Miliband Trust, Kingston University and donations from trade union branches and individuals.
Info and a trailer here: https://vimeo.com/331182945
WEBSITE
CONTACT INFO
City Projects
46 Brookbys’s Walk, London, E9 6DA
0781 306 2595
Email: info@cityprojects.org
Twitter: @solidarity_film
Sorry We Missed You
2019 ‧ Drama ‧ 1h 40m
Ricky and his family have been fighting an uphill struggle against debt since the 2008 financial crash. An opportunity to wrestle back some independence appears with a shiny new van and the chance to run a franchise as a self-employed delivery driver. It’s hard work, and his wife’s job as a carer is no easier. The family unit is strong but when both are pulled in different directions everything comes to breaking point.
Initial release: May 16, 2019 (France)
Director: Ken Loach
Producer: Rebecca O’Brien
Screenplay: Paul Laverty
Nominations: Palme d’Or, Cannes Best Actress Award, MORE
Production companies: Wild Bunch, Why Not Productions, Sixteen Films
Sorry We Missed You review – Ken Loach’s superb swipe at zero-hours Britain
Bricks
Carine Chichkowsky, a French filmmaker with the production company Survivance. She’s the producer of a new film called BRICKS, which looks at the brick manufacturing industry in Spain as a metaphor for the ramifications of the 2008 housing crisis.
Here’s the trailer. https://vimeo.com/169657849
Deepwater Horizon (2016)
Director: Peter Berg
Writers: Matthew Michael Carnahan (screenplay), Matthew Sand (screenplay) |3 more credits »
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, Douglas M. Griffin
A Hollywood thriller recreates the 2010 disaster in which a BP oil rig caught on fire and exploded, killing 11 people and releasing tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. High-level acting and special effects help tell the story of BP’s greed that led to the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
La Demolicion (2005) (The Demolition)
Year: 2006
Genre: Comedy.
Country: Argentina.
Format: Color.
Running Time: 78 minutes.
Original Title: La Demolición.
Directed by: Marcelo Mangone
Written by: Ricardo Cardoso / Marcelo Mangone
Photography: Martín Nico
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oCvZTJh52U
Based on a theatrical piece, it tells the story of a man tenacious about defending his company while, at the same time, another man shows up with the mission to destroy it. Osvaldo Lazzari undergoes precarious working conditions at a company that deals with the demolition of abandoned buildings. His boss has put him in charge of supervising the pulling down of an old textile factory where a big supermarket is meant to be built.
During the previous routine inspection, Lazzari finds an unexpected occupant in the building: Alberto Luna, a former employee obsessed with making the factory work again, who thinks that Lazzari has come to the company in order to reactivate production. And, as if that weren’t bad enough, police agents, promotional staff, the press staff and his own wife will turn poor Lazzari‘s situation even more difficult.
Cast in India (2014)
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
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