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Category Archives: Blacks

The Issue of Mr. O’Dell

22 Dec

Documentary about the life and work of Jack O’Dell, veteran African-American civil rights activist.

Directed and produced by Rami Katz

New Film Reveals Life of Civil Rights Activist Jack O’Dell

Awards:
President’s Award, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival ’18
Best International Short: Baltimore International Black Film Festival ’18
Honourable Mention, Documentary Short: Roxbury International Film Festival ’18

Festivals:
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival ’18
Freep Film Festival ’18
DOXA Documentary Film Festival ’18
Roxbury International Film Festival ’18
Rhode Island International Film Festival ’18
Montreal International Black Film Festival ’18
Baltimore International Black Film Festival ’18
St. Louis International Film Festival ’18
North Carolina Black Film Festival ’18

Educational Distributor (US): Cinema Guild
store.cinemaguild.com/nontheatrical/product/2581.html

“[A] personal and humanizing portrait” – Pat Mullen, POV Magazine
povmagazine.com/articles/view/review-the-issue-of-mr.-odell

“As a viewer, I was left wanting more.” – Esther Sun, Discorder Magazine
citr.ca/discorder/may-2018/doxa-2018-the-issue-of-mr-odell/

“O’Dell shares his insightful outlook on past and present race relations in the United States, augmented beautifully with the stark and poignant imagery” – Danielle Piper, The Georgia Straight
straight.com/movies/1069136/doxa-2018-review-issue-mr-odell

“Filmmaker Rami Katz combines archival material with beautifully shot footage of O’Dell in conversation to weave the story of a man who has fought his whole life for justice.” – Ljudmila Petrovic, Sad Mag
sadmag.ca/blog/2018/4/24/preview-belinda-and-the-issue-of-mr-odell-at-doxa

Facebook page: facebook.com/theissueofmrodell

Website: ramihkatz.com/theissueofmrodell

 
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Posted by on December 22, 2018 in Blacks, Class, Collective Bargaining, Communism/Socialism, Discrimination: Racism, Sexism, etc, Documentary, Organizing, Working Class

 

Green Book (2018)

22 Dec

dir Peter Farrelly

 
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Posted by on December 22, 2018 in Blacks, Discrimination: Racism, Sexism, etc, Drama, Entertainment Industry, Labor History

 

The Workers Cup (2016)

18 Dec

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

 
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Posted by on December 18, 2016 in Blacks, Class, Documentary, Global Economy, Immigrants/Immigration, Migrant workers

 

Love and Solidarity–The Story of Rev. James Lawson (2015)

11 Nov

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/

 
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Posted by on November 11, 2015 in Blacks, Discrimination: Racism, Sexism, etc, Documentary, Organizing

 

All Points North

17 Jul

Documentary (Athens/ London 2013, 25 minutes)
Producer: BlueArts Film, Mizgin Müjde Arslan, Dir: Therese Koppe
Original Language: French, with English subtitles.
Facebook page

“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.

 
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Posted by on July 17, 2014 in Blacks, Discrimination: Racism, Sexism, etc, Documentary, Immigrants/Immigration, Migrant workers

 

Ann Kore Moun – Collective Action: A Force For Development

03 Feb

(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

 
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Posted by on February 3, 2014 in Blacks, Children, Cities-Urban, Class, Documentary, Genre, Global Economy, Labor History, Themes, Women, Working Class

 

Coming For A Visit (On Vient Pour La Visite)

01 Nov

2013 | French | 58 min | HDcoming-for-a-visit | 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

 
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Posted by on November 1, 2013 in Blacks, Documentary, Immigrants/Immigration, Migrant workers

 

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

 

A Job at Ford’s: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)

02 Jul

PBS Great Depression Series, #1

Producer: WGBH, Boston

Narrator: Joe Morton

51 minutes

The first film in the WGBH Great Depression Series, this documentary uses the rise of the Ford system of manufacturing and workplace control as a prism into the onset of the socioeconomic cataclysm by the end of the 1920s known as the Great Depression. Stocked with oral histories with workers, managers, and working-class families, as well as archival film footage, it analyzes the ways in which the automobile, as a product of labor and a catalyst for deep transformations in American society, dominated American life and dictated its economic fortunes. Cars offered far greater access to travel and cultural experiences, especially for women and rural residents, than ever before. Auto work also attracted migrants from across the country, as well as from Mexico, to manufacturing centers in Detroit and the industrial North. Crucially, “A Job at Ford’s” illustrates the repressive labor-relations system that governed not only the workplace environment of auto workers, but also the daily lives of their families in order to ensure compliance with Henry Ford’s desires for social control. Additionally, the film devotes ample time to Ford’s anti-Semitic, racist beliefs, to the worsening conditions of the Depressions, the struggles of everyday people to survive largely without the direct help of the federal government, and the community-based efforts of political radicals and neighborhood groups to respond to the crises. Culminating with the Ford Hunger March in which Ford security guards killed four marchers and wounded over sixty others, the film conveys violence as not only a real threat to organizing at this time, but also a thread through, and force mitigating, working-class daily life in the early twentieth century.

 
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Posted by on July 2, 2013 in Available Online, Blacks, Cities-Urban, Class, Consumerism, Documentary, Global Economy, Immigrants/Immigration, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Manufacturing, Politics, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Themes, Transportation, Unemployment-Wages, Women, Working Class

 

Arsenal of Democracy: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)

02 Jul

PBS Great Depression Series, #7

Producer: WGBH, Boston

Narrator: Joe Morton

53 minutes

The seventh and final installment in the PBS Great Depression series, this film links the onset of World War II and the role of the United States as the primary producer of war materiel with the lingering struggles of the Great Depression. Blending oral history with photos from Dorothea Lange and others, archival films, and audio clips, “Arsenal of Democracy” details the persistent plight of the poor throughout the 1930s, especially for migrant workers, farmers, and the homeless who, despite the historical attention they received, often remained outside the public and political scope at that time. It also explores the social, cultural, and economic changes that the transition from peace to war wrought, such as the racism and discrimination that African Americans and Asians experienced during the 1930s and in hiring and job opportunities; the internment of Japanese Americans after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; the use of racist imagery in wartime propaganda; greater employment opportunities for women and African Americans in wartime production; California’s incredible growth due to massive outlays of federal spending; and the end of the Great Depression.

 

 

 
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Posted by on July 2, 2013 in Arts/Culture, Blacks, Class, Discrimination: Racism, Sexism, etc, Documentary, Labor History, Manufacturing, Migrant workers, Politics, War, Women, Working Class

 
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