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Category Archives: Immigrants/Immigration

The Seaman (2014)

Filmmaker: Ting-Ging YU

Taiwan | 2014 | Fiction | 18 minutes

Acen’s girlfriend, Yuli, is a caregiver, and she always waits for him to come back; Anan misses his home in Indonesia by viewing the sea. One day, he meets Dora. They fall in love with each other, and Anan feels the love of a girl who comes from his homeland.

2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival

 

Second Class (2013)

Filmmakers: Marta Dauliute and Elisabeth Marjanovic ́ Cronvall

Sweden/Lithuania | 2013 | Documentary | 60 minutes

“Do you feel cheaper?” We are filming Lithuanian migrant working men in Sweden. They do not want to be on camera, they do not want to participate in creating one more media image for guilt and pity. They film us. We empty a bottle of moonshine, we dance on their porch. They might let us film them tomorrow.

Through sincere and frustrating negotiation to get access to film the migrant workers, Second Class becomes a discussion about class, the value of work and human. While showing the filming process film raises questions about power relations in film industry itself.
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

 

Union Time


Filmmaker: Matthew Barr
A true David versus Goliath story, “Union Time” is a promotional teaser for a documentary in production about the successful fight to unionize the world’s largest pork slaughterhouse, located in Tar Heel, NC.

 

Mother Jones: ‘The Most Dangerous Woman in America’

9 minutes
by Jeff Manning

 

Bread and Roses: The Lawrence Textile Strike

6:17m

The Lawrence Textile Strike was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World. Prompted by one mill owner’s decision to lower wages when a new law shortening the workweek went into effect in January, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers at nearly every mill within a week. The strike, which lasted more than two months and which defied the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized, was successful; within a year, however, the union had largely collapsed and most of the gains achieved by the workers were lost.

 

Century of Women

on garment workers, 1909 strike, Triangle, 15 minutes

 

Small Homeland

2013
Drama
Italy
Director: Alessandro Rossetto
Writers: Caterina Serra, Alessandro Rossetto, Maurizio Braucci
111 Minutes

 

Bread, Concrete, and Roses

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

 

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.