A collection of Canadian archival films, this is a website for anyone with an interest in history. For educators, these are innovative, accessible sources of history and tools for teaching. These century-old films cover a wide range of subjects and were highly popular in the era they were made. Both documentaries and narrative films are featured on this site. The former provides details about work and workplaces or important societal changes. Narrative films feature moral lessons that tell us much about attitudes and social values.
Sample titles:
Old Logging Mills 1930 (8:34)
Miners in the Making 1922 (9:49)
Life in a Mining Camp 1921 (3:35)
Read more: Canada’s Early Industrial Films are Useful to Labor and Social Historians
Category Archives: Manufacturing
THE MOVING PAST
Company Town
When the last factory in a small Rust Belt town closes its doors, an unlikely hero emerges in dutiful, quiet Allery Parkes. A career employee of the factory, the aging Allery, can’t reconcile how to live a life simply sitting at home doing nothing. Against the advice and pleas of his loving wife Lola, he forms an unlikely friendship with his charismatic neighbor Walter, in order to revive the defunct factory. As their community rallies around them – and as their former corporate bosses strategize how to implode this unexpected movement – Allery learns that he might be something he never thought possible: a leader.
Film info: Drama | 109 min | Director: Robert Jury | Country: USA | Language: English | Subtitles: Swedish
Made in Bangladesh
2019 ‧ Drama ‧ 1h 30m
Made in Bangladesh is a 2019 Bangladeshi drama film directed by Rubaiyat Hossain. It was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.
Initial release: September 6, 2019
Director: Rubaiyat Hossain
Language: Bengali language
‘Made in Bangladesh’: Film Review | TIFF 2019
Notes by Steve Cook, President, Washington Baltimore News Guild; cookstevend@gmail.com
Tells the story of a garment worker who decides to organize her coworkers into a union after a fire kills her best friend. The young woman, Shimu, has to overcome skepticism from her coworkers, resistance from her husband, double-crossing from a coworker, pressure from her bosses, bureaucratic inertia from the government, and a host of obstacles like we all face.
I want everyone in my shop and other open shops to see this movie. It really lays out what we all face in organizing, but the stakes are clear as day in a way that it often is difficult to communicate to our units. It would be great if it were available in DVDs, so locals could show it, or people could share it in their homes, or pass it around.
The film also highlights the universal struggles unions face anywhere in the world. The things I described above are things we face in our own organizing efforts. I also took away a message of solidarity with working people regardless of their nationality, geographic location, gender, or ethnicity. Their struggle is our struggle. These are messages that people must hear again and again. Cameron Bailey, the TIFF artistic director called Shimu, “the Norma Rae we need now.”
This movie has distribution in France starting Dec. 5 though an outfit called Pyramide International, which TIFF lists as the international sale agent. As far as I know, no one has picked it up in North America. I think it would be ideal for the DC Labor Filmfest, but also would be great if it could get exposure in North America in the meantime. If you have connections in the distribution industry, perhaps you could spread awareness of the movie among them.
The contact information for Pyramide in the TIFF book are sales@pyramidefilms.com, and 0033142960220.
I also am including some links that give you a fuller idea of what Made in Bangladesh is about. I hope I’ve given enough description of how important I think this movie is. Please feel free to contact me for a fuller description or for any way that I may be able to help.
Steve Cook, President, Washington Baltimore News Guild; cookstevend@gmail.com
https://www.tiff.net/events/made-in-bangladesh
Q&A following the TIFF screening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPNS4XEoZRU
Pyramide International
http://inter.pyramidefilms.com/pyramidefilms-international-catalogue/made-in-bangladesh.html
They Don’t Wear Black Tie (1981) Eles Não Usam Black-Tie
2h | Drama | 18 April 1982 (USA)
Brazilian drama film directed by Leon Hirszman, based on Gianfrancesco Guarnieri’s play of the same name. Union leader’s son doesn’t want to engage in a strike, because his wife is pregnant, thus disregarding his father’s tradition of political activism. The film revolves around a working-class family in São Paulo in 1980. Otávio, a syndicalist leader, and Romana are the parents of Tião, whose girlfriend, Maria, becomes pregnant. Fearing to be fired and thus unable to support his now fiancée, Tião does not participate on a strike, which starts a series of family conflicts.
Xmas without China (2013)
Directed By: Alicia Dwyerl
Runtime: 70 min
Stars: – – –
Synopsis: Exploring the intersection of commercialism and immigration in American culture, the documentary filmmakers follow their friend and fellow filmmaker Tom Xia on an intimate, humorous journey to get to know his neighbors
Ditching the Fear (2015)
Trailer: http://en.labournet.tv/video/6941/ditching-fear-trailer
Directed by: Rosa Cannone/Johanna Schellhagen
Running Time: 80 minutes.
Starring: N/A
Since 2008 in northern Italy, unusual things have been happening. Companies, the political class and the media are using the onset of the crisis to further undermine workers’ rights, which have been, up until now, crushed. On the other side, a lively and strong resistance has been forming at the bottom end of the wage scale.
Of all people, it is the precarious and largely migrant workers in the logistics sector who have, through solidarity and effective organizing, been successful in overcoming their isolation and degrading working conditions. A struggle that hasn’t just changed their working conditions but has changed their whole lives.
“I’d been talking with the girls since 2012 because I came to know about this union called SI Cobas. But there has been a lot of fear because they put you in a condition of servility, you are enslaved to the point that you can’t even say ‘a’. You don’t say anything, you work item after item after item… So I’d been speaking with the girls since 2012 and I don’t know how it happened. It was good luck.” (Yoox Worker, from the film)
Robot Somnambulism (2016)
Richard HSIAO
2016 / Taiwan / Documentary / 90min /
Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics OEM factory, manufactured and assembled more than 50% iPhone of the world. In 2010, the serial jumping of Foxconn workers caught attention. People holding iPhone suddenly noticed that it’s producer were working like a robot, acting every 7 seconds, 12 hour a day. They felt a bit uneasy, but cannot loosen their hand. Smartphone has changed human life completely. On the other side, the company supplying touch panels to HTC were suppressing worker union. Union and supporting students choose HTC to protest, making its managers feel embarrassed and aggrieved. Meanwhile, one of HTC engineer died possibly because of overworking. His last message on Facebook was “off work, issue still not resolved”, AM 3 o’clock, Sunday. In this era, robotic people making humanized machine, is it a hopeless tragedy, or the beginning of a brave new world?
Machines (2016)
India, Germany, Finland (Director: Rahul Jain) — This intimate, observant portrayal of the rhythm of life and work in a gigantic textile factory in Gujarat, India, moves through the corridors and bowels of the enormously disorienting structure—taking the viewer on a journey of dehumanizing physical labor and intense hardship.
Daunting descent to the underworld of a textile factory in Gujarat, in North-western India, where the cheap clothes for the first world are made. This factory represents many more from Western India, where the scenary and the conditions are like the ones we see here. Claustrophobic, hermetic, unhealthy, dark spaces, with the air saturated of toxic smoke emanated from dye chemicals. Tied to looms, sleepy teenagers, youths and mature men work twelve hours a day for starvation wages: many of them go into debt in order to pay the train ticket to travel from rural areas to the urban factories. The brutal working conditions dehumanize the workers, to the point of turning them into appendixes of machines. Landless peasants join the files of workers without rights nor holydays. Few well selected interviews to workers convey what happens here: employers oppression without any constraint from the State, lack of trade-union reply due to the killing of their leaders, no viable alternative to survive out of the factory.
Relevance: With an excellent cinematography (it gained the Price of the best documentary photography in Sundance), the film transfers a feeling of anguish without loosing artistic dignity. We roam labyrinthic corridors and stagnant rooms, and we absorb the rhythm of production through the monotonous noises from the machines. This great debut of Rahul Jain give voice and faces to some of the more sorely afflicted slaves in the twenty-first century.
Note courtesy Docs and the World
Joy of Man’s Desiring (Que ta joie demeure) (2014)
1h 10min | Documentary, News | 16 January 2015 (USA)
Director: Denis Côté
Writer: Denis Côté
Stars: Olivier Aubin, Ted Pluviose, Hamidou Savadogo |
An open-ended exploration of the energies and rituals of various workplaces. From one worker to another and one machine to the next; hands, faces, breaks, toil: what kind of absurdist, abstract dialogue can be started between human beings and their need to work? What is the value of the time we spend multiplying and repeating the same motions that ultimately lead to a rest – a state of repose whose quality defies definition.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/jIaWeSRqNAg
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