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Category Archives: Self-Employed/Freelance

La Cola (The Line)

03 Feb

The Line is a drama from Argentina. Written and directed by Enrique La ColaLiporace and Ezequiel C. Inzaghi, starring renowned Argentine acting professionals such as Alejandro Awada, Lucrecia Oviedo, Ana María Picchio and Antonio Gasalla.

The Line focuses on the experiences of Félix Cayetano Gómez, who lives in the city of Buenos Aires and has to scramble daily to make ends meet. This man discovers a way to earn money by waiting in lines to run different errands or do paperwork for other people, in exchange of a sum of money.

But Félix is not the only one who works as a “line man”, there are many others doing the same job and all of them dream about forming an employee’s union that can group and protect them.

At some point in the story, those other workers reveal to Félix a criminal plan that would allow him to collect much more money: it is related to waiting in lines to do education, health and work related paperwork. As a consequence of his job, the main character will become a witness and an accomplice of a tragic but comical reality that will also affect his own life.

Original Title: La cola.
Starring: Alejandro Awada, Lucrecia Oviedo, Antonio Gasalla, Ana María Piccio.
Genre: Drama.
Directed by: Enrique Liporace, Ezequiel C. Inzaghi.
Country of Origin: Argentina.
Running Time: 99 minutes.
Rated: PG-13
Released in Buenos Aires: September 13th, 2012.
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-_73RuRg_w

 

 
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Posted by on February 3, 2016 in Crime-Action, Drama, Self-Employed/Freelance

 

Gaucho del Norte (2015)

06 Dec

54 min | Documentary, Adventure, Western
Directors: Andres Caballero, Sofian Khan

In the quiet, bucolic Patagonian countryside in the town of Bahia Murta with 587 inhabitants we meet Eraldo Pacheco, a thoughtful man who has recently arrived at a momentous decision. “Things are worse here than ever,” Eraldo tells his father and family as he announces his plan to move to the United States to fulfill a three-year contract tending sheep almost 6,000 miles away in rural Idaho. In this observational documentary of impressive beauty and painterly cinematic images the imbalance of economic forces is seen in high relief.
With poetic subtlety the film speaks to the economic fragility of these remote and rural communities in South America as well as the precarious and fickle agricultural economy up north. Once in Salt Lake City, Utah, we meet Jhonny Qispe, from Peru, who also made the trek up north and who also left a wife and two children behind.
Peaceful, meditative scenes envelop the viewer – vast desert, steep mountains, winter’s terrain and thousands of sheep belie the angst of the economic woes that cause a separation between a man and his beloved, his elders, his children, and the spiritual majesty of his homeland. Jhonny is also deeply invested in being a provider for his family. But what might seem like a pastoral, nomadic life is a lonely and tough existence.
While Eraldo is up north, he continues to fret about not being in Chile tending to his family, especially his elderly parents. Did he make the right choice?

 
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Posted by on December 6, 2015 in Documentary, Immigrants/Immigration, Migrant workers, Self-Employed/Freelance, Temp/Precarious work

 

Buzzard (2014)

06 Dec

97 min | Comedy, Drama | 6 March 2015 (USA)
Director/writer: Joel Potrykus
Stars: Joshua Burge, Joel Potrykus, Teri Ann Nelson

Marty is a caustic, small-time con artist drifting from one scam to the next. When his latest ruse goes awry, mounting paranoia forces him from his lousy small town temp job to the desolate streets of Detroit with nothing more than a pocket full of bogus checks, a dangerously altered Nintendo® Power Glove, and a bad temper. Albert Camus meets Freddy Krueger in BUZZARD, a hellish and hilarious riff on the struggles of the American working class.

NYTimes: Review: In ‘Buzzard,’ an Angry, Unkempt Antihero
An unsparing portrait of an office temp and scam artist near the bottom of the economic food chain.
NYTimes: Joel Potrykus’s Film ‘Buzzard’ Is Inspired by Dead-End Jobs
The writer and director’s deadpan comedies have followed a man-child on the skids.

 
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Posted by on December 6, 2015 in Comedy, Consumerism, Drama, Self-Employed/Freelance, Technology, Temp/Precarious work, Working Class

 

7 Chinese Brothers (2015)

11 Nov

76 min  |  Comedy  |  28 August 2015 (USA)

Director/writer: Bob Byington

Stars: Jason Schwartzman, Stephen Root, Olympia Dukakis
Larry (Jason Schwartzman) is content with his dog Arrow and booze, barely tolerating anything or anyone else. His marginally successful relationships include his grandmother, who keeps him afloat financially, and his best friend Norwood, who provides him with pharmaceuticals. But a chance encounter at a Jiffy Lube gives Larry a beguiling new boss and the impetus to head in another direction for a while. This movie showcases all that may be needed to help a person get unstuck in life: love (or an unrequited crush), friendship (or someone your family likes better than you) and family (or in this case a grandmother who will support you whenever you get fired from a job).

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/movies/review-7-chinese-brothers-a-slacker-comedy-starring-jason-schwartzman-and-his-dog.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

This droll film, written and directed by Bob Byington, drifts aimlessly but appealingly with Mr. Schwartzman as its lost hero.

 
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Posted by on November 11, 2015 in Comedy, Philosophy, Self-Employed/Freelance, Working Class

 

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

 

I Can Quit Whenever I Want

24 Jan

2014
Comedy
Italy
Director: Sydney Sibilia
Writers: Valerio Attanasio, Andrea Garello, Sydney Sibilia
100 Minutes

A university researcher is fired because of the cuts to the university. To earn a living, he decides to produce drugs recruiting his former colleagues, who despite their skills are living at the margins of society.
–IMDb

 
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Posted by on January 24, 2015 in Arts/Culture, Class, Comedy, Consumerism, Education, Occupation/Type of Work, Self-Employed/Freelance, Themes, 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

 

Together: How Cooperatives Show Resilience To The Crisis

03 Jan

http://www.together-thedocumentary.coop/#!the-documentary/cadp

It’s a fact. In Europe, 1.5 million workers co-own their enterprises. They are called worker cooperatives, social cooperatives or participative enterprises. The documentary TOGETHER reveals, through extensive research and exclusive interviews, why those enterprises show a major resilience to the crisis and its consequences through 4 examples: a mineral water plant in Poland (Muszynianka), a company in crisis transformed into a worker cooperative in France (Fonderie de l’Aisne), a consortium of social cooperatives in Italy (Consorzio SIS) and one of Spain’s main business groups (MONDRAGON Corporation).

Year: 2012
Country: Belgium/Spain.
Running time: 39 min.
Audio format: English, French, Italian & Spanish
Genre: Documentary
Producer:​ CECOP-CICOPA Europe
Managing producer:​ Leire Luengo​
Production company: m30m
Director: Ana Sánchez.​
Scriptwriters: Bruno Roelants, Olivier Biron, Leire Luengo, Ana Sánchez
Director of Photography: José Luis Fernández

 
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Posted by on January 3, 2014 in Big Business/Corporations, Communism/Socialism, Documentary, Finance, Global Economy, Self-Employed/Freelance

 

The Road to Rock Bottom: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)

03 Jul

PBS Great Depression Series, #2

Producer: WGBH, Boston

Narrator: Joe Morton

53 minutes

This film, the second in the PBS Great Depression Series, examines the plight of farmers, sharecroppers, and agricultural workers before and particularly during the onset of The Great Depression. Devoting ample time to the hardships of agricultural labor, it focuses on the devastating effects that environmental factors such as drought wrought on farmers, migrant laborers, and sharecroppers alike. Sliding farm prices due to the glut of products on the market spurred a cycle of diminishing returns for most farmers, exacerbating their indebtedness and causing foreclosures, homelessness, privation, and starvation. “The Road to Rock Bottom” also devotes considerable time to the allure that Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd had among many impoverished Americans in the early Depression era. A bank robber, Floyd enjoyed popular support–and occasionally some protection–among struggling farming communities, for Floyd’s targeting banks tapped into their resentment at institutions that, on the one hand many blamed for causing the Great Depression and, on the other, were increasingly foreclosing on their farms and homes. The inability and unwillingness of the federal government to devote far more resources to battling the onslaught of poverty and desperation receives ample attention in the documentary as well. Many politicians, including President Herbert Hoover, believed that increasing the federal government’s role in the daily lives of its citizens would foster dependency that ran counter to the themes of individualism permeating both America’s political parties at that time, and long-standing American political traditions. Culminating the film is the Bonus Army’s march to and occupation of parts of Washington D.C. Its unsuccessful efforts to pressure Congress to pay the service bonus to military veterans earlier than promised resulted in violent clashes between the Army (led by Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur) and the Bonus marchers, sealing the fate of the Hoover presidency well before his overwhelming electoral defeat to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential elections.

 

 
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Posted by on July 3, 2013 in Arts/Culture, Blacks, Children, Cities-Urban, Class, Documentary, Environment, Farm & Food, Labor History, Migrant workers, Self-Employed/Freelance, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Working Class

 

Sign Painters (2013)

11 Mar

Directors: Faythe Levine & Sam Maconbloggersigns
Director of Photography: Travis Auclair
Editor: Bill Marmor
Produced by: Timm Gable & Jonah Mueller
US; 75m
View official trailer: http://vimeo.com/61006621
website: http://signpaintermovie.blogspot.com/
Press inquiries: signpaintermovie@gmail.com

There was a time, as recently as the 1980s, when storefronts, murals, banners, barn signs, billboards, and even street signs were all hand-lettered with brush and paint. But, like many skilled trades, the sign industry has been overrun by the techno-fueled promise of quicker and cheaper. The resulting proliferation of computer-designed, die-cut vinyl lettering and inkjet printers has ushered a creeping sameness into our landscape. Fortunately, there is a growing trend to seek out traditional sign painters and a renaissance in the trade.

In 2010 filmmakers Faythe Levine and Sam Macon began documenting these dedicated practitioners, their time-honored methods, and their appreciation for quality and craftsmanship. Sign Painters, the first anecdotal history of the craft, features the stories of more than two dozen sign painters working in cities throughout the United States. The documentary and book profiles sign painters young and old, from the new vanguard working solo to collaborative shops such as San Francisco’s New Bohemia Signs and New York’s Colossal Media’s Sky High Murals.

 
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Posted by on March 11, 2013 in Arts/Culture, Communications, Documentary, Self-Employed/Freelance

 
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