1m; U.S.
Director: Paul Rey-Burns
Synopsis: It’s a lonely job, but someone’s got to do it — time to get organized maybe…
Contact: Paul Rey-Burns (paul.reyburns@mac.com)
Category Archives: Occupation/Type of Work
Pitfall (Otoshiana) [1962]
97m; Japan
Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Cast: Hisashi Igawa, Kunie Tanaka, Hideo Kanze, Sen Yano, Kazuo Miyahara, Sumie Sasaki, Kei Sato
Synopsis: A miner (Hiroshi Segawa) and his son (Kazuo Miyahara) set out to find work in Western Japan after a spate of fruitless endeavours.
Pleasure For The People
90m; France
Director: Jean-Pierre Thorn
Synopsis: Tells the story through hip-hop and music of the immigrant Morrocan and African youth in France and the racism that they face.
Plunder: The Crime of our Time (2009)
100m; U.S.
Director: Danny Schechter
Synopsis: A hard-hitting investigative film that explores how the financial crisis was built on a foundation of criminal activity uncovering the connection between the collapse of the housing market and the economic catastrophe that followed.
Contact: http://plunderthecrimeofourtime.com/contact.htm
Portrait of Teresa (Retrato de Teresa) [1979]
103m; Cuba
Director: Pastor Vega
Cast: Idalia Anreus, Miguel Benavides and Samuel Claxton
Synopsis (IMDB): Teresa is overwhelmed: with a husband, three young sons, a job as a crew leader in a textile factory, and volunteer commitments as cultural leader of her union. Her husband, Ramón, wants more of her attention; her feelings are mixed, wanting domestic peace, feeling responsibilities to the revolution, and wanting to control her own life beyond doing dirty dishes. They separate; he begins an affair. When he wants a reconciliation, she asks what his response would be if she’d had an affair too. “But men are different,” is his reply. He’s failed her test, and to hold on to independence and self-respect, she remains uncompromising and hard-edged.
Prairie Fire (1977)
30m; U.S.
Director: John Hanson & Rob Nilsson
Synopsis: History of the populist, agrarian Nonpartisan League in North Dakota, 1915-1921. Includes film segments made during that time, plus numerous stills.
Remote Sensing (2001)
53m
Director: Ursula Biemann
Synopsis (Women Make Movies): In Biemann’s latest video, she traces the routes and reasons of women who travel across the globe for work in the sex industry. By using the latest images from NASA satellites, the film investigates the consequences of the U.S. military presence in South East Asia as well as European migration politics. This video-essay takes an earthly perspective on cross-border circuits, where women have emerged as key actors and expertly links new geographic technologies to the sexualization and displacement of women on a global scale. By revealing how technologies of marginalization affect women in their sexuality, REMOTE SENSING aspires to displace and resignify the feminine within sexual difference and cultural representation.
Website: http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c564.shtml
Trade Secrets (1985)
23m
Director: Stephanie Antalocy
Synopsis (Women Make Movies): Perfect as a training tape or as an historical look at labor issues in the 1980s, TRADE SECRETS has been purchased by hundreds of colleges, libraries, community and women’s groups. “An ironworker, a sprinkler fitter, and an electrician; all women who describe their jobs and the physical and personal obstacles they overcame to get where they are. In the 1970’s, because of jobs with new equal employment laws, women began to enter the construction trades challenging the traditional male world. Regarded with hostility and suspicion, not all women completed their apprenticeships to be fully qualified as journey women. One who did, an ironworker, describes how tired she was each day as work ended because of her refusal to give up. An Asian woman who had been a secretary for ten years, speaks of suing for harassment when she lost a job after refusing to go out with her foreman. A female welder tells of getting burns until she developed skills and the eventual love of her job. Marrying a fellow welder from the shipyards, she relies on him to help out at home in raising their family. A sprinkler fitter describes the problems she had with men on the job until they saw that she could carry her own share of the work. A woman who teaches skills to women entering the trades explains that she teaches self-esteem and confidence building to women more than the skills themselves. The greater financial power of women in the trades, and their new sense of identity as journey women are discussed in this film about some of the changes taking place in the workplace today.
Website: http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c192.shtml
Troubled Harvest (1990)
30m
Directors: Sharon Genasci and Dorothy Velasco
Synopsis (Women Make Movies): This award-winning documentary examines the lives of women migrant workers from Mexico and Central America as they work in grape, strawberry and cherry harvests in California and the Pacific Northwest. Interviews with women farm workers reveal the dangerous health effects of pesticides on themselves and their children, the problems they encounter as working mothers of young children, and the destructive consequences of U.S. immigration policies on the unity of their families. Featuring an interview with Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union.
Website: http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c72.shtml
Made In India: SEWA in Action (1998)
52m
Director: Patricia Plattner
Synopsis (Women Make Movies): This powerful documentary is a portrait of SEWA, the now-famous women’s organization in India that holds to the simple yet radical belief that poor women need organizing, not welfare. SEWA, or the Self-Employed Women’s Association, corresponds to the Indian word sewa, meaning service. Based in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, a dusty old textile town on the edge of the Gujarati desert, SEWA is at its core a trade union for the self-employed. It offers union membership to the illiterate women who sell vegetables for 50 cents a day in the city markets, or who pick up paper scraps for recycling from the streets–jobs that most Indian men don’t consider real work.
Inspired by the political, economic and moral model advocated by Mahatma Gandhi, SEWA has grown since its founding to a membership of more than 217,000 and its bank now has 61,000 members, assets of $4 million and customers who walk in each day to deposit a dollar or take out 60 cents. Following the lives of six women involved in the organization, including Ela R. Bhat, its visionary founder, Plattner’s documentary is an important look at the power of grassroots global feminism.
Website: http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c488.shtml
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