2013
Documentary
Turkey
Director: Yonetmen
The film is about the dangerous life of construction workers in a foreign land far from their homeland, and their social problems.
–Written by Steven Zeltzer
Category Archives: Class
Bread, Concrete, and Roses
Istanbul Rising
2013
Documentary
18 Minutes
Vice News
The effort to protect the privatization of Gezi Park in Istanbul touched off one of the biggest protests and demonstrations in Turkey. This film shows how the people tried to protect the park from developers and property speculators who the AKP Prime Minister Erdogan represents.
The Southeast of Ankara
2013
Documentary
Director: Yonetmen
22 Minutes
The families of those immigrated for various reasons live in the four edge districts of Ankara which are located in the boundaries of Çankaya. The families who have lived for years in this region are exposed to an enforced immigration for urban transformation. The movie expresses the urban transformation and immigration subjects through the viewpoint of the children of those families.
Detachment
2011
Drama
Director: Tony Kaye
Writer: Carl Lund
A strong cast and good acting punctuate this drama about well-worn themes in contemporary cinema and educational discourse—failed public schools and the teachers allegedly indifferent to the pervasive, seemingly intractable social problems in them. Adrien Brody plays a substitute teacher who, in his one-month stint in a long-suffering public school, encounters teachers barely hanging on to their jobs and vocational motivation, and teenage students struggling with identity problems, abuse, and serious adult dilemmas such as prostitution. Hard-hitting indictment of not just the problems afflicting US public education but also some of the remedies advanced to solve them.
Eat Sleep Die
2012
Directed by Gabriela Pichler
Sweden
104 mins
Nermina Lukac’s electrifying performance as Raša is the heart of director Gabriela Pichler’s feature debut. A Montenegrin-born young woman living in rural Sweden, Raša is laid off from her job at a food-packing plant. Her ensuing job search pulls us through the maze of limited prospects and frustrating bureaucracy facing the country’s working immigrant population. Affable, resilient, street smart and soft-hearted, Raša’s natural magnetism draws us in completely. We feel every ounce of her disappointment, fear and elation as she soldiers on, looking for work. An Audience Award winner at the Venice Film Festival, EAT SLEEP DIE’s assured naturalism and political conviction single out Pichler as a bold, exciting new cinematic voice. Her film is a positive rallying cry for low-wage workers who dream of a life that won’t merely add up to the three verbs that form the film’s title.
– Mike Dougherty, American Film Institute
Tala
Tala is a young Filipino domestic worker living with a bourgeois family on the north shore of Montreal. As she runs through her daily chores, dealing with the eccentricities of her employers, an unexpected phone call puts her at great risk of getting fired. Shot in a single long take and inspired by the current ‘Live-In Caregiver’ program of the Canadian federal government, ‘Tala’ tells a story of subtle oppression and re-empowerment.
Directed by: Pier-Phillippe Chevigny
Tangled Threads
“Tangled Threads” chronicles labor rights activist Kalpona Akter’s organizing efforts in Bangladesh’s garment industry before and after the Rana Plaza building collapse, which claimed the lives of at least 1,138 garment workers. It does so against the backdrop of two very different worlds: New York’s modeling industry, on the one hand, and Bangladesh’s garment industry, on the other. Produced by STZFilms.
Directed by: Sara Ziff
Sara Ziff is a New York-based filmmaker, fashion model, and labor activist. She co-directed and produced the feature documentary “Picture Me” (2009), which shed light on labor issues in the modeling industry, particularly sexual abuse. Currently she serves as co-founder and executive director of the Model Alliance, a nonprofit labor group for models working in the American fashion industry. Ziff first traveled to Bangladesh in 2012, when she began collaborating with the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS) and the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) to try to organize workers across fashion’s supply chain.
https://www.facebook.com/stzfilms
Workers Republic
What would you do? Your boss gives you three days’ notice that your workplace is closing. You will be unemployed in a recession, without the severance the law says you deserve. If you are the employees of Republic Windows and Doors… you fight back! For six days in December of 2008, laid-off Chicago factory workers took over their closing workplace, declaring they would not leave until the owners and creditors agreed to pay them the severance they were owed. Republic’s credit line had been cut off by Bank of America, which had just received billions of dollars in federal bank bailout money. These 260 workers decided, “If I don’t fight, I know I’ll lose. If I do fight, at least I stand a chance of winning.” In these revolutionary times, when a new movement has risen from below to occupy Wall Street and expose the greed of bosses and banks, the workers of Republic are a beacon of hope and optimism, a microcosm of how everyday people may be the most qualified to forge a better world.
Directed by: Andrew Friend
http://vimeopro.com/insurgentproductions/andrew-friend/video/30882647
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