1h 33m
In late 19th century Switzerland, a factory worker becomes involved with a local group of anarchist watchmakers.
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‘Unrest’ Review: The Times Are Not A-Changin’
Category Archives: Automation
Idiocracy (2006)
Director: Mike Judge
Writers: Mike Judge (story), Mike Judge (screenplay) | 1 more credit »
Stars: Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard
Private Joe Bauers, the definition of “average American”, is selected by the Pentagon to be the guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program. Forgotten, he awakes five centuries in the future. He discovers a society so incredibly dumbed down that he’s easily the most intelligent person alive.
Robot Somnambulism (2016)
Richard HSIAO
2016 / Taiwan / Documentary / 90min /
Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics OEM factory, manufactured and assembled more than 50% iPhone of the world. In 2010, the serial jumping of Foxconn workers caught attention. People holding iPhone suddenly noticed that it’s producer were working like a robot, acting every 7 seconds, 12 hour a day. They felt a bit uneasy, but cannot loosen their hand. Smartphone has changed human life completely. On the other side, the company supplying touch panels to HTC were suppressing worker union. Union and supporting students choose HTC to protest, making its managers feel embarrassed and aggrieved. Meanwhile, one of HTC engineer died possibly because of overworking. His last message on Facebook was “off work, issue still not resolved”, AM 3 o’clock, Sunday. In this era, robotic people making humanized machine, is it a hopeless tragedy, or the beginning of a brave new world?
Machines (2016)
India, Germany, Finland (Director: Rahul Jain) — This intimate, observant portrayal of the rhythm of life and work in a gigantic textile factory in Gujarat, India, moves through the corridors and bowels of the enormously disorienting structure—taking the viewer on a journey of dehumanizing physical labor and intense hardship.
Daunting descent to the underworld of a textile factory in Gujarat, in North-western India, where the cheap clothes for the first world are made. This factory represents many more from Western India, where the scenary and the conditions are like the ones we see here. Claustrophobic, hermetic, unhealthy, dark spaces, with the air saturated of toxic smoke emanated from dye chemicals. Tied to looms, sleepy teenagers, youths and mature men work twelve hours a day for starvation wages: many of them go into debt in order to pay the train ticket to travel from rural areas to the urban factories. The brutal working conditions dehumanize the workers, to the point of turning them into appendixes of machines. Landless peasants join the files of workers without rights nor holydays. Few well selected interviews to workers convey what happens here: employers oppression without any constraint from the State, lack of trade-union reply due to the killing of their leaders, no viable alternative to survive out of the factory.
Relevance: With an excellent cinematography (it gained the Price of the best documentary photography in Sundance), the film transfers a feeling of anguish without loosing artistic dignity. We roam labyrinthic corridors and stagnant rooms, and we absorb the rhythm of production through the monotonous noises from the machines. This great debut of Rahul Jain give voice and faces to some of the more sorely afflicted slaves in the twenty-first century.
Note courtesy Docs and the World
Joy of Man’s Desiring (Que ta joie demeure) (2014)
1h 10min | Documentary, News | 16 January 2015 (USA)
Director: Denis Côté
Writer: Denis Côté
Stars: Olivier Aubin, Ted Pluviose, Hamidou Savadogo |
An open-ended exploration of the energies and rituals of various workplaces. From one worker to another and one machine to the next; hands, faces, breaks, toil: what kind of absurdist, abstract dialogue can be started between human beings and their need to work? What is the value of the time we spend multiplying and repeating the same motions that ultimately lead to a rest – a state of repose whose quality defies definition.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/jIaWeSRqNAg
Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream (2015)
http://matzofilm.com/
65 min | Documentary, Family, History | 12 April 2015 (USA)
Director/writer: Michael Levine
On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in a series of four nondescript brick tenement buildings, sits the Streit’s Matzo factory. In 1925, when Aron Streit opened the factory’s doors, it sat at the heart of the nations largest Jewish immigrant community. Today, in its fifth generation of family ownership, in a rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side, it remains as the last family owned matzo factory in America.
(note: the factory closed in April 2015; workers will have to commute to New Jersey)
COTTON ROAD (2014)
Directed by Laura Kissell
72 min | Documentary, News | 5 April 2014 (USA)
AMERICANS CONSUME NEARLY 20 BILLION NEW ITEMS OF CLOTHING EACH YEAR. YET FEW OF US KNOW HOW OUR CLOTHES ARE MADE, MUCH LESS WHO PRODUCES THEM. COTTON ROAD FOLLOWS THE COMMODITY OF COTTON FROM SOUTH CAROLINA FARMS TO CHINESE FACTORIES TO ILLUMINATE THE WORK AND INDUSTRIAL PROCESSES IN A GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN.
What does a rural town in South Carolina have to do with China? Americans consume nearly twenty billion new items of clothing each year, and at least one billion of them are made in China. Cotton Road uncovers the transnational movement of cotton and tells the stories of worker’s lives in a conventional cotton supply chain. From rural farms in South Carolina to factory cities in China, we span the globe to encounter the industrial processes behind our rapacious consumption of cheap clothing and textile products. Are we connected to one another through the things we consume? Cotton Road explores a contemporary landscape of globalized labor through human stories and provides an opportunity to reflect on the ways our consumption impacts others and drives a global economy.
The Real Rosie the Riveter Project
This archive of filmed oral histories was created by filmmakers Anne de Mare, Kirsten Kelly and Elizabeth Hemmerdinger under the guidance of the irreplaceable Dr. Michael Nash. The 48 women represented here provide a complex portrait of Rosie the Riveter, taking the viewer beyond the iconic “We Can Do It” poster girl and deep into the experiences real Rosies from diverse backgrounds, challenging the popular perception of women in American History. The filmmakers were inspired by the extraordinary women of The Real Rosie The Riveter Project to develop this material into an animated documentary project using new media technologies called The Girl With The Rivet Gun.
Directed by: Kirsten Kelly, Anne de Mare
http://dlib.nyu.edu/rosie/node/1029
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