R; 1h 53m
A hard-working, blue-collar dad just wants to provide a good life for his quick-witted 10-year-old daughter. His mundane San Fernando Valley pool cleaning job is a front for his real source of income: hunting and killing vampires.
‘Day Shift’ Review: Stakes Out
1973 action crime–drama film based on the 1969 novel of the same name by Sam Greenlee (which was first published in the United Kingdom by Allison and Busby after being rejected by American publishers). It is both a satire of the civil rights struggle in the United States of the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of Black militancy. Dan Freeman, the titular protagonist, is enlisted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its elitist espionage program, becoming its token Black person. After mastering agency tactics, however, he becomes disillusioned and drops out to train young Black people in Chicago to become “Freedom Fighters”. As a story of one man’s reaction to white ruling-class hypocrisy, the film is loosely autobiographical and personal.
The novel and the film also dramatize the CIA’s history of giving training to persons and/or groups who later utilize their specialized intelligence training against the agency – an example of “blowback.”
Directed by Ivan Dixon, co-produced by Dixon and Greenlee, from a screenplay written by Greenlee with Mel Clay, the film starred Lawrence Cook, Paula Kelly, Janet League, J. A. Preston, and David Lemieux. It was mostly shot in Gary, Indiana, because the themes of racial strife did not please Chicago’s then-mayor Richard J. Daley. The soundtrack was an original score composed by Herbie Hancock, who grew up in the same neighborhood as Greenlee.
In 2012, the film was added to the National Film Registry, which annually chooses 25 films that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”.
United Kingdom (Director: Adam Sobel) — Inside Qatar’s labor camps, African and Asian migrant workers building the facilities of the 2022 World Cup compete in a football tournament of their own. World Premiere. DAY ONE
Michael Honey’s film with Errol Webber
In 1960, Reverend James Lawson helped to launch the Nashville sit-in campaign which successfully desegregated the Woolworth’s lunch counter, and inspired a new generation of student civil rights activities throughout the South. After Nashville he pastored the largest African American Methodist Church in Memphis and continued to work closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham and on other civil rights campaigns, teaching workshops in nonviolence. At each stage of his life, Lawson has supported campaigns for labor rights as a dimension of human rights.
Next to King himself, Reverend Lawson remains one of the most important social justice leaders of our time. This project set out to examine the legacy of Reverend Lawson, particularly his nonviolent approach to labor and civil rights, and to help share his story. The Love & Solidarity project did just that when it premiered a film by the same name that chronicles Lawson’s life and work as a force for positive change. In addition the Love & Solidarity project, led by Dr. Michael Honey, has launched the Love & Solidarity website to help share this story of how ordinary people can use nonviolence to make a more peaceful and just world.
This is a project of the Fetzer Advisory Council on Labor, Trades, and Crafts.
Michael Honey, Fred and Dorothy Haley Professor of Humanities
1900 Commerce St. Tacoma, WA 98402
253-692-4454
michaelkhoney@gmail.com
mhoney@uw.edu
University of Washington, Tacoma
http://faculty.washington.edu/mhoney/
Documentary (Athens/ London 2013, 25 minutes)
Producer: BlueArts Film, Mizgin Müjde Arslan, Dir: Therese Koppe
Original Language: French, with English subtitles.
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“It certainly will be a different Europe, not like here in Greece”, states Laurent in an assuring voice. The dream of heading North is the driving motivation for Laurent and Ibrahim, two young men leaving their country of Senegal in search of a better life.As undocumented migrants, they find themselves trapped in Greece, bound to the Greek borders by the lack of immigration papers. Before leaving their homeland their impressions of Europe were very different from the harsh realities they faced once arriving. For migrants such as Laurent and Ibrahim, there is no stability in a better, safer land; their journeys to find such are continually ongoing.
(André Vanasse & Jean-Nathan Aristil, 2012, 36 min) Unions in many sectors of Haitian society and their role in economic development.
http://www.productionsbonsai.com
2013 | French | 58 min | HD
| French with English subtitles
Director Lucie Tourette
Undocumented migrants win the battle to get their papers. A historic strike filmed from within.
Paris, 2009. More than 6000 undocumented migrants (sans-papiers) go on strike to demand their legalization. Despite being illegals, Mohamed, Diallo, Hamet and others have worked and paid taxes in France for years in restaurants, cleaning companies, or construction. They have invested all their energy in this battle: now that their status has been disclosed publically, there is no way back.
http://www.vezfilm.org/comingforavisit/
Trailer : http://vimeo.com/53048336
lucie tourette lucie_tourette@yahoo.fr
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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