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Category Archives: Public Sector

Great Guy (1936)

1936 crime film starring James Cagney and Mae Clarke. In the film, an honest inspector for the New York Department of Weights and Measures takes on corrupt merchants and politicians.

Directed by John G. Blystone
Written by James Edward Grant (story)
Screenplay by Henry McCarty
Starring James Cagney
Mae Clarke
Release date: December 1936
Running time: 75 minutes
Country United States
Language English

Full film here

 

 

Uniquely Nasty: The U.S. Government’s War on Gays

Following the U.S. Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, Yahoo News presents a new 30-minute documentary, “Uniquely Nasty: The U.S. Government’s War on Gays,” reported and narrated by chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff. The film explores a dark and little-known chapter in America’s recent political past, when gays and lesbians were barred from working for the federal government and the FBI, through its“sex deviates” program, secretly collected hundreds of thousands of files on the sex lives of American citizens.

“Uniquely Nasty” includes never-before-seen government memos by legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (read by George Takei) and John Steele, a top lawyer for the U.S. Civil Service Commission (read by Matt Bomer) asserting that gays were “not suitable” for federal employment.

More details here

https://www.yahoo.com/news/video/uniquely-nasty-official-full-trailer-190844260.html?ref=gs

https://www.yahoo.com/news/uniquely-nasty-u-governments-war-180000816.html?format=embed

 

Labour in a Single Shot

http://www.labour-in-a-single-shot.net

Starting in 2011 artist, curator, and author Antje Ehmann and filmmaker, video artist and author Harun Farocki initiated video production workshops in 15 cities around the world in which participants were to engage with the subject of ‘labour’: paid and unpaid, material and immaterial, traditional or new. The videos could not be longer than two minutes and they had to be taken in a single shot. The camera could be static, panning or travelling but cuts were not allowed. This concept references the Brother Lumière’s famous film Workers Leaving the Factory which was filmed in one continuous take from a fixed camera position.

The result of these workshops, which were organised together with local branches of the Goethe-Institut, are 400 films which show people engaged in all kinds of work, each film taking a different stance, literally and figuratively, towards its subject while also recording the diverse mental attitudes and bodily relation people have to their work.

Facing the challenge of filming something that might be essentially repetitive, continuous and boring, the films also foreground the work of the camera operator and his or her aesthetic decisions. In the multitude and diversity the films form a visual compendium and an archive of labour and cinema in the 21st century that is never boring or repetitive but enhances and simultaneously questions our perception and understanding of work.

All the films can be watched on a dedicated website, at random, or sorted by city, colour or type of work. A selection of 90 films was shown as an installation at the House of World Culture in Berlin from 27 February to 6 April 2015 with an accompanying conference. This exhibition also presented the project ‘Workers Leaving the Factory in 15 Cities’ (2011 – 2014), consisting of contemporary remakes of the famous film by the Lumière Brothers which were shot in 15 cities all over the world. Also included in the exhibition was the installation ‘Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades’ (2006), which showed scenes of workers leaving the factory throughout the history of cinema, from the Lumière Brothers (1895) to Lars van Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000).

‘Labour in a Single Shot’ is a co-production of the Harun Farocki Filmproduktion with the Goethe-Institut.

www.harunfarocki.de

 

Citizen Koch (2013)

Set against the rise of the Tea Party in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, a citizen uprising to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker collides with the Tea Party-aligned “Americans for Prosperity,” a group founded and lavishly financed by two of the world’s richest men —David and Charles Koch. As Republican working class voters find themselves in the crosshairs of their own party and its billionaire backers, they are forced to choose sides. Directed by Academy Award®-nominated directors Carl Deal & Tia Lessin (Trouble the Water; co-producers Fahrenheit 911 and Capitalism: A Love Story). [Watch Trouble the Water here: www.troublethewaterfilm.com]

America — they’re coming for you next. That’s the warning from a Wisconsin state employee after her union rights were destroyed by a Republican governor funded by corporate and billionaire donors whose ultimate goal is to break the unions nationwide — and cripple the labor-backed Democratic party. “Citizen Koch” explores what the Wisconsin playbook and the U.S. Supreme Court decision that unleashed a new era of unbridled special-interest spending mean for us all. And it poses a crucial question: Who owns democracy in America? 90 minutes.

 

 

155 Sold

46 min; 2012, Greece, Greek in English subtitles
Directed by George Panteleakis
film website

Greece was selected to be the first European economic experiment with a massive austerity program to privatize and destroy social services. This destruction of jobs and public services led to a massive protest in May 2011 and this full contact documentary shows the struggle shot by the film maker and activists in the struggle. Thick clouds of smoke covered the angry protests around Syntagma Square (Constitution Square) on 28-29 June 2011, while a majority of 155 deputies of the Greek Parliament bowed down to the austerity agenda. The working class, retirees and students engaged in mass protests and faced violence against them by the police.

 

The United States of ALEC

A national consortium of state politicians and powerful corporations, ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Council — presents itself as a “nonpartisan public-private partnership”. But behind that mantra lies a vast network of corporate lobbying and political action aimed to increase corporate profits at public expense without public knowledge…

http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-united-states-of-alec-a-follow-up/

 

War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State (2013)

directed by Robert Greenwald

Not only is Big Brother now watching your every move, the Government is also preventing you from speaking out. In our new full length documentary War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State we tell the stories of four people who were silenced and the journalists who were finally able to get their voices heard.

info@bravenew01.org

 

The Spirit of ’45 (2013)

directed by Ken LoachSpiritOf45
UK
Documentary

An impassioned documentary about how the spirit of unity which buoyed Britain during the war years carried through to create a vision of a fairer, united society

1945 was a pivotal year in British history. The unity that carried Britain through the war allied to the bitter memories of the inter-war years led to a vision of a better society. The spirit of the age was to be our brothers and our sisters keeper.

Director Ken Loach has used film from Britain’s regional and national archives, alongside sound recordings and contemporary interviews to create a rich political and social narrative. The Spirit of 45 hopes to illuminate and celebrate a period of unprecedented community spirit in the UK, the impact of which endured for many years and which may yet be rediscovered today.

Distributor: Dogwoof
Patrick Hurley
patrick@dogwoof.com

The Spirit of ’45 – first look review (The Guardian)

The Spirit of ’45: Berlin Review (The Hollywood Reporter)

Ken Loach’s ‘The Spirit Of 45’ An Effective But Conservatively Presented Doc About Radical Social Change (IndieWire)

 

 

The Waiting Room (2012)

Directed by Peter Nicks
Unrated, 1 hr. 21 min.

24 hours in a public hospital emergency room waiting room.

The Waiting Room is a character-driven documentary film that uses extraordinary access to go behind the doors of an American public hospital struggling to care for a community of largely uninsured patients. The film – using a blend of cinema verité and characters’ voiceover – offers a raw, intimate, and even uplifting look at how patients, staff and caregivers each cope with disease, bureaucracy and hard choices.

The ER waiting room serves as the grounding point for the film, capturing in vivid detail what it means for millions of Americans to live without health insurance. Young victims of gun violence take their turn alongside artists and small business owners who lack insurance. Steel workers, taxi cab drivers and international asylum seekers crowd the halls. The film weaves the stories of several patients – as well as the hospital staff charged with caring for them – as they cope with the complexity of the nation’s public health care system, while weathering the storm of a national recession.

The Waiting Room lays bare the struggle and determination of both a community and an institution coping with limited resources and no road map for navigating a health care landscape marked by historic economic and political dysfunction. It is a film about one hospital, its multifaceted community, and how our common vulnerability to illness binds us together as humans.

trailer at whatruwaitingfor.com

 

To The Workers of The World (2002)

4m; U.S.

Director: Tammy Gold

Synopsis: Tribute to workers who died at World Trade Towers in 2001.

Contact: 212-772-4953; tgold@hunter.cuny.edu tamigold@mindspring.com