8m; Canada
Director: Kim Hutchinson
Synopsis: Retraining for the Global Economy is a comedy that documents the economic woes of Windsor, Ontario, and dares to ask the question: Where do we go from here?
Contact: khutch@huffmanroadproductions.com 519 738 3216 (Home)
78m; U.S.
Director: Brett Story
Synopsis: A hard-working petrochemical town is rocked by revelations that its workers suffer an epidemic of cancers. But even more terrifying is the looming spectre of deindustrialization and joblessness. In the rich fabric of the city’s landscape – rows of boarded storefronts, the bright sprawl of petrochemical plants and the swollen rooms of hospital wards and crowded bars – one finds a microcosm of the 21st century. Tattooed men serving fries, basement musicians, boilermakers and volunteer firemen, heartbroken widows and an optimistic mayor – the lives of a diverse medley of characters intersect to reveal the dramas and contradictions of an industrial town out of sync with a post-industrial world. As the dystopian architecture of the petrochemical plants, squatted like crushed space stations just meters away from homes and schoolyards, give way to the spaces that make this city a community, we begin to see what it is that everyone seems so afraid to lose. A portrait of a working-class city in paralysis and a mediation on work and place in the modern economy, Land of Destiny offers a poignant and universal story about work, community, and struggle in an era of globalization.
Contact: http://www.bunburyfilms.com/films/trailer/doc/lod.html
82m; China/Canada
Director: Lixin Fan
Synopsis: Every spring, China’s cities are plunged into chaos, as all at once, a tidal wave of humanity attempts to return home by train. It is the Chinese New Year. The wave is made up of millions of migrant factory workers. The homes they seek are the rural villages and families they left behind to seek work in the booming coastal cities. It is an epic spectacle that tells us much about China, a country discarding traditional ways as it hurtles towards modernity and global economic dominance. Last Train Home, an emotionally engaging and visually beautiful debut film from Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan, draws us into the fractured lives of a single migrant family caught up in this desperate annual migration.
Contact: http://www.eyesteelfilm.com/?page_id=60 info@eyesteelfilm.com 4475 St. Laurent, suite #202 Montreal, Quebec CANADA H2W 1z8 Phone directory: phone: +1 (514) 937-4893
110m; Austria
Director: Erwin Wagenhofer
Synopsis: “Follow the money” is a mantra in both crime and business, perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not. For director Erwin Wagenhofer, whose 2005 documentary sensation WE FEED THE WORLD traced the global path of food from raw materiel to table, it was perhaps inevitable that his follow-up would be the visual tone poem to commerce, LET’S MAKE MONEY. From Indian slums to Hong Kong boardrooms, the Spanish real estate bubble to the World Bank, Wagenhofer is there to juxtapose captains of industry-“there’s a famous saying that the best time to buy is when there’s blood on the streets,” says one-with those actual streets, where laborers work in primitive conditions and billboards offer goods and services they can’t possibly afford.
41m; Turkey
Director: Petra Holzer, Selçuk Erzurumlu, Ethem Özgüven Kurgu
Synopsis: Tuzla graveyard overlooks massive shipbuilding area where great profits are made and workers die.
Contact: http://4857-documentary.blogspot.com/ petramh@gmail.com
Year: 2007
Director: Charles Latour
Producer: Charles Latour
Country: Canada
Time: 60 Minutes
Every year, some 4000 migrant foreign workers coming mostly from Mexico labour in Quebec farms to plant and pick vegetables in Canada. In the summer of 2006 Patricia Perez, a pro-union militant speaking for the UFCW, launches a major drive to organize the workers in several farms South of Montreal. She struggles to protect them by bringing them under a union that would give them the same rights as Canadian agricultural workers. This film is about the injustices of globalisation, not in the Third World, but in Canada.
96m; Germany
Director: Michael Loeken, Ulrike Franke
Synopsis: German efficiency and Chinese industriousness pass each other on globalization’s economic ladder.
Contact: Hans-Peter Metzler Submission Contact buero.metzler@t-online.de +49 (0)7542 951270 (Work)
52m; China
Director: Jean Yves Cauchard
Synopsis: Made in China tells one of the millions of stories of migrants from rural China who comprise the backbone of the Chinese economic miracle. It provides a human face behind the ubiquitous label “Made in China.”
30m; U.S.
Director: Eve-Laure Moros and Linzy Emery
Synopsis: Human costs of everyday products we purchase.
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