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Category Archives: Retail

IN THE AISLES (IN DEN GÄNGEN)

06 Nov

Germany, 2018, 125 min., Director: Thomas Stuber, Screenplay: Clemens Meyer, Thomas Stuber, Cast: Sandra Hüller, Franz Rogowski, Peter Kurth, Distribution: MusicBox Films

After the shy and reclusive Christian loses his job, he finds work at a wholesale market. Bruno from the beverage aisle takes him under his wing and quickly becomes a fatherly friend to him. He shows him the ropes and patiently teaches him how to operate the fork lift. Among the aisles of the store, Christian meets “Sweets”-Marion. He is instantly smitten by her enigmatic charm. The coffee machine becomes their regular meeting point, and the two start getting to know each other. But Marion is married, and Christian’s feelings for her seem to remain unrequited. Christian slowly becomes a member of the wholesale market family, and his days of driving fork lifts and stacking shelves mean much more to him than meets the eye—especially when Marion does not return to work one day.

German Film Guild Award & Ecumenical Jury Award Berlin 2018
German Film Award 2018 (Best Leading Actor)

Thomas Stuber was born in 1981 in Leipzig and completed his degree in Media and Directing at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in 2011. With the short film Es geht uns gut he won the Young Talent Award of the Film Industry in Baden-Württemberg in 2006. His first feature film Teenage Angst was selected for the Berlinale/Perspektive Deutsches Kino in 2008 and won the German Young Talent Award at the Sehsüchte International Student Film Festival. In 2011 his short film Of Dogs and Horses was nominated for the First Steps Award. It won the Gold German Short Film Award and received a second prize Student-Oscar in 2012. His feature film A Heavy Heart premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and won the Silver German Film Award in 2016. His latest film, In the Aisles, premiered in Competition at the Berlinale 2018.

 
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Posted by on November 6, 2018 in Drama, Retail, Service Workers, Working Class

 

Blood Fruit (2014)

11 Nov

DIR/PROD Sinead O’Brien. Ireland, 2014, color, 80 min. In English. NOT RATED

This moving documentary explains how a strike over the sale of South African fruit in Ireland became the focus of world attention as a key battleground in the fight against apartheid. The film takes audiences back to 1984, the height of apartheid in South Africa. Mary Manning, a 21-year-old Dunnes Stores checkout girl, refused to sell two Outspan grapefruits under direction from her union in support of the anti-apartheid struggle. She and ten other supporters were suspended and a strike ensued. The eleven knew little about apartheid and assumed they’d be back to work before long, but the arrival on the picket line of activist Nimrod Sejake changed everything, setting the strikers on a path never expected. His influence on the strikers and their struggle to bring about change proved to be the central turning point in their motivation for not only continuing the strike but advancing it to the international stage.

Nominated for Prix Europa 2014
Winner of Best Feature Documentary – Galway Film Fleadh 2014

Director contact: sinead.obrien.dublin@gmail.com
Find us on facebook.com/bloodfruit2014
Follow us on twitter.com/BloodFruit2014

 
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Posted by on November 11, 2015 in Collective Bargaining, Documentary, Retail, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Women

 

Hard Labor (2015) (Trabalhar Cansa)

11 Nov

Not rated
In Portuguese, with English subtitles
Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes

Workplace tensions intersect with domestic stresses in Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s “Hard Labor,” a tense drama inching toward stark metaphor. Otávio (Marat Descartes) is a middle-aged, middle-class apartment dweller in São Paulo, Brazil, who has just lost an unspecified white-collar job. He receives the news just as his wife, Helena (Helena Albergaria), is trying to get a modest grocery store business off the ground. Parents to a young daughter, they are an affectionate, mutually supportive pair, but the vicissitudes of their struggles exact a cost. Otávio attends a humiliating job interview in which he is questioned while seated opposite two younger men seeking the same position. An employment counselor tells him his search could take a year. Eventually he is reduced to telephone sales, cold calling customers to pitch insurance. His efforts pale beside the troubles of Helena, who faces thieving employees, strained relations with a young housekeeper (Naloana Lima) she has hired, leaky plumbing and something hidden behind a wall at her store that exudes a foul odor and might be alarming a dog across the street. The filmmakers, largely forgoing a soundtrack, skillfully manipulate stillness, silence and anomie to unsettling effect — at times evoking the ambient dread and decay of, say, Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion.” That Mr. Descartes and especially the skilled Ms. Albergaria are devoid of movie star airs elicits our sympathy. As does a lingering shot of a line of applicants for store employment, a group portrait of Brazil’s recessionary casualties.
– New York Times

 
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Posted by on November 11, 2015 in Cities-Urban, Drama, Farm & Food, Horror, Retail, Unemployment-Wages

 

Labour in a Single Shot

11 Nov

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

 
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Posted by on November 11, 2015 in Communications, Construction Trades, Documentary, Education, Entertainment Industry, Farm & Food, Finance, Global Economy, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Migrant workers, Philosophy, Public Sector, Retail, Self-Employed/Freelance, Service Workers, Technology, Textile Industry, Transportation, White Collar, Working Class

 

A Day’s Work (2015)

19 Nov

“A Day’s Work” is a documentary film that examines the landmark workplace death of 21-year-old Lawrence
DaQuan “Day” Davis through the eyes of his family and the analysis of experts. Day was an employee of a
temporary staffing agency working at the Bacardi bottling plant in Jacksonville Florida in 2012. He was killed
90 minutes into the first day of the job – the first job of his life. The film introduces the prospective that the
temporary staffing industry makes workplaces more dangerous, is used to hide the safety records of some of
the biggest employers in the country, and makes the American Dream harder to reach for millions of working
people. With thousands killed in preventable workplaces accidents every year in the US, the film provides a
reminder of the cost of just one individual by vividly looking into the life and perspective of Day’s 17-year-old
sister Antonia.

90 minutes before he was killed on his first day of work as a temporary employee, 21-year-old Day Davis
texted a picture of himself to his girlfriend, excited for their future. Now Day’s sister, 17-year-old Antonia,
searches for answers. An investigation reveals the issues that led to Day’s death and how the $100 billion
temporary staffing industry is putting millions of American workers at risk.

Dave DeSario
tempemployees@gmail.com
(631) 374-6458

Documentary, 2015
TRT 54 min
Dir: David M Garcia
Prod: Dave DeSario

Film Website: http://www.tempfilm.com/film2/
Director’s Website: DavidMGarcia.com
Producer’s Organization: TemporaryEmployees.org

 
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Posted by on November 19, 2014 in Documentary, Retail, Self-Employed/Freelance, Service Workers, Working Class

 

Tangled Threads

29 Jun

“Tangled Threads” chronicles labor rights activist Kalpona Akter’s organizing efforts in Bangladesh’s garment industry before and after the Rana Plaza building collapse, which claimed the lives of at least 1,138 garment workers. It does so against the backdrop of two very different worlds: New York’s modeling industry, on the one hand, and Bangladesh’s garment industry, on the other. Produced by STZFilms.

Directed by: Sara Ziff

Sara Ziff is a New York-based filmmaker, fashion model, and labor activist. She co-directed and produced the feature documentary “Picture Me” (2009), which shed light on labor issues in the modeling industry, particularly sexual abuse. Currently she serves as co-founder and executive director of the Model Alliance, a nonprofit labor group for models working in the American fashion industry. Ziff first traveled to Bangladesh in 2012, when she began collaborating with the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS) and the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) to try to organize workers across fashion’s supply chain.

https://www.facebook.com/stzfilms

 

 
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Posted by on June 29, 2014 in Arts/Culture, Big Business/Corporations, Cities-Urban, Class, Consumerism, Documentary, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Retail, Safety & Health, Textile Industry, Women, Working Class

 

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Tears in the Fabric

23 Jun

A Documentary Film and Resource Website by Rainbow Collective and Openvizor. In Savar, Bangladesh, Razia struggles to raise two grandchildren after losing her daughters in the Rana Plaza factory collapse, a disaster which claimed the lives of over 1000 garment workers. One year on, Tears in the Fabric follows Razia as, amidst the struggle of raising and educating her grandsons, she searches for resolution and answers through protest on the streets of Dhaka and amongst the rubble and torn fabrics of Rana Plaza. Tears in the Fabric offers a starkly honest and deeply moving view of the human cost of high street fashion.

Directed by: The Rainbow Collective, UK

http://www.rainbowcollective.co.uk/#!tears-in-the-fabric/c1zdc

 

 
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Posted by on June 23, 2014 in Cities-Urban, Consumerism, Documentary, Global Economy, Manufacturing, Organizing, Outsourcing, Retail, Service Workers, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Textile Industry, Women, Working Class

 

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Price Check (2012)

12 Feb

For Pete, settling down with a wife and son meant giving up his unstable musical career to work for a third-rate supermarket chain.

Cast: Parker Posey, Eric Mabius, Annie Parisse

 
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Posted by on February 12, 2014 in Comedy, Drama, Netflix Watch Instantly, Retail

 

Women’s Day (Dzien Kobiet)

03 Feb

Halina is promoted to store manager of the supermarket chain „Motylek“ („Butterfly“). But her life as chief is just transient when she finds herself being abandoned by the system for being overly humane. Social-critical feature film debut by the famous Polish musician Maria Sadowska.’ The chains’ name ‘Butterfly’ is a paraphrase of an existing Portuguese-owned chain of discount supermarkets in Poland, which were infamous for the treatment of the workforce until unionised by NSZZ “Solidarność”
http://www.filmfestivalcottbus.de/en/archive/2012/films/pgm_id=1269&film_id=992&seite=3

 
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Posted by on February 3, 2014 in Drama, Farm & Food, Philosophy, Retail, Service Workers, Women

 

A Killer Bargain (2006)

21 Jan

Image

Directed by: Tom Heinemann
Documentary Feature (57 minutes)

A Killer Bargain refers to the availability of cheap consumer goods, imported by Western companies, whose prices don’t reflect the human and environmental costs of their production. Consumers remain unaware of the conditions under which the goods they buy are produced. This film makes those connections shockingly clear. Would you buy that batik tablecloth if you knew the children making it were working with cancer-causing solutions everyday?

 
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Posted by on January 21, 2014 in Children, Consumerism, Documentary, Retail, Technology

 

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