2012
Directed by: Tanja Wol Sorensen
Documentary Short (27 minutes)
There are more than 500,000 domestic workers living in Spain today. The large majority are migrant women from Latin American countries. Through the stories of three Latin American women living in Barcelona, we get an insight into the reality of being a migrant woman and a domestic worker in Spain today. Through their own words, we learn about their motivations for crossing oceans to live in Catalonia, and why they choose to keep living outside of their native country. Despite the discrimination and abuse they experience, these women are actively trying to improve the rights and conditions for themselves and for others.
In Dreamworks China, in the suburbs of Shenzhen, in Guangdong province, young workers talk about their lives, existences built on a precarious balance between hope, struggles and wishes for the future. Around them activists and NGO’s strive to give sense and meaning to words like rights, dignity and equity. This is an important film in understanding China in the age of Apple and Foxconn, the huge Chinese manufacturer of IPhones.
It’s a fact. In Europe, 1.5 million workers co-own their enterprises. They are called worker cooperatives, social cooperatives or participative enterprises. The documentary TOGETHER reveals, through extensive research and exclusive interviews, why those enterprises show a major resilience to the crisis and its consequences through 4 examples: a mineral water plant in Poland (Muszynianka), a company in crisis transformed into a worker cooperative in France (Fonderie de l’Aisne), a consortium of social cooperatives in Italy (Consorzio SIS) and one of Spain’s main business groups (MONDRAGON Corporation).
Year: 2012
Country: Belgium/Spain.
Running time: 39 min.
Audio format: English, French, Italian & Spanish
Genre: Documentary
Producer: CECOP-CICOPA Europe
Managing producer: Leire Luengo
Production company: m30m
Director: Ana Sánchez.
Scriptwriters: Bruno Roelants, Olivier Biron, Leire Luengo, Ana Sánchez
Director of Photography: José Luis Fernández
7:19m
Theo Rigby/Kate McLean
A short documentary explores the tender relationship between a caretaker who is an undocumented immigrant and an elderly woman in the last months of her life.
Synopsis
Milan, Italy, August 2009.
Four workers climb a 20 metres high gantry crane inside the hangar of the INNSE, the last active factory in Milan. They threaten to throw themselves down to stop the dismantling of the machineries and the closure of the factory they work in. The hangar is surrounded by dozens of policemen and supporters from all over Italy.
It is not a simple struggle.
They have a clear strategy.
They have an organized army.
They know perfectly their territory and their enemy.
There are clear rules, it is a war with a workable paradigm for all forms of struggle.
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.
Director: Rory B. Quintos
Writers: Ricardo Lee (story), Raymond Lee (story)
Stars: Vilma Santos, Claudine Barretto, Joel Torre Phillipines
The main character is a Filipina overseas contract worker, one of the many residents of the archipelago who is forced to leave her family and take a higher paying job in a more prosperous Asian country. While she is working her employer refuses to let her take a vacation, nor does he deliver her mail to her. She is unaware, therefore, that her husband has died. When she finally returns to the Philippines she is met with resentment and hatred by her children. The movie studies how she overcomes these feelings and rebuilds the relationship with her family.
55m written/directed by Tommaso Facchin and Ivan Franceschini website
The dreams and rights of a new generation in the world’s factory. In the suburbs of Shenzhen, in Guangdong province, young workers talk about their lives, existences built on a precarious balance between hope, struggles and wishes for the future. Around them activists and ZNGOs strive to give sense and meaning to works like rights, dignity and equity.
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