a film that explores the growing privatization of public schools and the resulting impact on America’s most vulnerable children.
Category Archives: Cities-Urban
WILD MOUSE [WILDE MAUS]
A music critic in midlife crisis seeks revenge on the boss who fired him in this satirical seriocomedy, the directorial debut of actor Josef Hader (THE BONEMAN, STEFAN ZWEIG: FAREWELL TO EUROPE). Unwilling to come clean about his termination, Georg (Hader) pretends to go to work each day, but instead hangs out in Vienna’s Prater amusement park, where he befriends ride operator Erich (Georg Friedrich), previously his childhood tormentor. Georg becomes increasingly attracted to Erich’s Romanian girlfriend Nicoletta (Crina Semciuc), more alienated from his therapist wife, Johanna (Pia Hierzegger) and more aggressive in his stealth harassment of his ex-boss (Jörg Hartmann). Official Selection, 2017 Berlin Film Festival. DIR/SCR Josef Hader; PROD Veit Heiduschka, Michael Katz. Austria/Germany, 2017, color, 103 min. In German and Italian with English subtitles. NOT RATED
Run Time: 103 Minutes
Genre: Dark comedy
Champ of the Camp (2013)
Director: Mahmoud Kaabour
75 min | Documentary, Music |
With unprecedented access, this creative documentary paints a complete portrait of life in Dubai’s labor camps, told entirely in the voices of the laborers as we follow their participation in a huge Bollywood singing competition
http://www.champofthecampmovie.com/
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)
Tales (2014) “Ghesse-ha” (original title)
88 min | 30 July 2015 (Argentina)
A series of seven vignettes about different people dealing with their every day problems in modern day Iran, that are loosely related to each other.
Director: Rakhshan Bani-Etemad
Writers: Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Farid Mostafavi
Stars: Habib Rezaei, Mohammad Reza Forutan, Mehraveh Sharifinia
Open Eyes (2013)
Filmmaker: Martin Aletta
Argentina/Japan | 2013 | Fiction | 15 minutes
Tokyo. Ryo goes to his job at the railway company where he’s task is remove the remains of the railroad due to the numerous suicides. Saki, a young girl, wanders around her city contemplating an apathetic society. Her walk drives her to the platform of station where Ryo finds her…
2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival
Ya Wooto (2014)
Filmmaker: Jenny Cartwright
Canada/Burkina Faso | 2014 | Documentary | 68 minutes
From his village to the big city, Sylvain is trying to make it in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso, one of the world’s five poorest countries. There, he found a job as a bar manager at Le coin des Amis, a “buvette” owned by Hortense, a policewoman trying to make ends meet. Work is home for Sylvain: he works seven days a week and sleeps in the backroom. He has only one thing in mind: saving up enough money to get his driver’s license. If he succeeds, he could drive a merchandise truck, a job that would allow him to find a wife and start a family. In Burkina Faso, you are not really an adult until you are married. That is why he saves 100% of the 20$ he makes every month. In a year’s time he will have saved up enough cash to start his lessons.
2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival
A REALITY EVERY SECOND (2015)
Filmmaker: Karim Ouelhaj
Belgium | 2015 | Fiction | 95 minutes
Driving around under the lights of the city, Lucky, a social worker, is looking for Romane, a young teenager who has ran away. On his way, he meets Vladimir, an unconventional person, horrified by the moral decadence around him. Through the gaze of these characters, A Reality Every Second immerses us into the universe of those we are usually turning away from.
2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival
Hard Labor (2015) (Trabalhar Cansa)
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
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEc2_6zHUys
Waydowntown
2000
Comedy
Canada
Director: Gary Burns
Writers: Gary Burns, James Martin, Patrick McLaughlin
87 Minutes
This satirical lens into office work, corporate culture, and urban life involves a wager between co-workers as to who can last the longest without venturing outdoors. With their office building connected to both a well-stocked shopping center and their apartments, this appears a cinch. However, nearly a month into the contest at a retirement party, things go awry when one of the bettors, assigned to follow the CEO, discovers an unsavory secret about him.
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 