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Category Archives: Themes

Apache 8 (2011)

17 Apr

57m

Director: Sande Zeig

Synopsis (Women Make Movies): Between 1974 and 2005, a crew of women from the White Mountain Apache Tribe fought raging fires in Arizona and other states. Featuring extensive interviews, childhood photos, and on-location and news footage, this insightful and honest documentary profiles the Apache 8 group through four women, who share their experiences. Interweaving the scenes of raging fires, intense training sessions, and disrupted home life are personal stories of sacrifice, tragedy, pride, and accomplishment. While the women may have initially set out to try and earn a living in their economically ravaged community, they quickly discover an inner strength and resilience that speaks to their traditions and beliefs as Native women.

Website: http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c815.shtml

 
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Posted by on April 17, 2012 in Documentary, Public Sector, Women

 

Dish: Women, Waitressing and the Art of Service (2010)

17 Apr

58m

Director: Maya Gallus

Synopsis (Women Make Movies): Why do women bring your food at local diners, while in high-end establishments waiters are almost always men? DISH, by Maya Gallus, whose acclaimed GIRL INSIDE (2007) won Canada’s Gemini Award for documentary directing, answers this question in a delicious, well-crafted deconstruction of waitressing and our collective fascination with an enduring popular icon. Digging beyond the obvious, Gallus, who waited tables in her teens, explores diverse dynamics between food servers and customers, as well as cultural biases and attitudes they convey. Her feminist analysis climbs the socio-economic ladder—from the bustling world of lower-end eateries, where women prevail as wait staff, to the more genteel male-dominated sphere of haute cuisine. Astute, amusing observations from women on the job in Ontario’s truck stop diners, Montreal’s topless”sexy restos,” a Parisian super-luxe restaurant, and Tokyo’s fantasy “maid cafés”, as well as male customers’ telling comments, disclose how gender, social standing, earning opportunities, and working conditions intersect in the food service industry.

Website: http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c808.shtml

 
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Posted by on April 17, 2012 in Documentary, Women

 

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Europlex (2003)

17 Apr

20m

Directors: Ursula Biemann and Angela Sanders

Synopsis (Women Make Movies): The fourth in Ursula Biemann’s critically acclaimed series of video essays that investigates migration across borders, EUROPLEX, a collaboration with Angela Sanders, tracks the daily, sometimes illicit, border crossings between Morocco and Spain- a rare intersection of the first and third worlds. Paying off officials to look the other way, workers smuggle contraband across the border, sometimes crossing up to 11 times a day. In a now common scenario of global economics, Moroccan women work in North Africa to produce goods destined for the European market. And in perhaps the most surreal example of border logic, domesticas commute into a Spanish enclave in Moroccan territory, losing two hours as they step into the European time zone. With a mesmerizing soundtrack and a dizzying blend of video footage, digital graphics and text, the film exposes a fascinating, often hidden layer in the cultural and economic landscape between Europe and Africa- revealing the new rules and profound implications of globalization.

Website: http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c620.shtml

 
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Posted by on April 17, 2012 in Documentary, Migrant workers, Women

 

Hell to Pay (1988)

17 Apr

52m

Directors: Alexandra Anderson and Anne Cottringer

Synopsis (Women Make Movies): A moving and politically sophisticated analysis of the international debt situation through the eyes of the women of Bolivia, the poorest country in Latin America. Although most directly affected by government austerity programs, peasant women are assumed not to understand the workings of international capital and foreign policy. HELL TO PAY poignantly contradicts such assumptions as teachers, textile workers and miners’ wives speak vividly and with great comprehension of the causes of the debt crisis and the burden they are forced to bear.

Website: http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c73.shtml

 
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Posted by on April 17, 2012 in Documentary, Women

 

Escuela (School) [2002]

17 Apr

53m

Director: Hannah Weyer

Synopsis (Women Make Movies): There are over 800,000 students enrolled in migrant education programs in the United States and, of those, only 45-50% ever finish high school. ESCUELA, the sequel to Hannah Weyer’s critically acclaimed documentary LA BODA, personalizes these glaring statistics through the honest portrait of a teenage Mexican-American farm worker, Liliana Luis.

Website: http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c573.shtml

 
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Posted by on April 17, 2012 in Children, Documentary, Farm & Food, Migrant workers

 

Deadline for Action (1946)

17 Apr

40m

Director: Carl Marzani

Synopsis (WorldCat): This film analyses the post-World War II economic situation as experienced by one UE worker named Bill Turner. It focuses on the impact of the nation-wide strike in 1946 when over two million workers went out in protest over wage cutbacks. An animation sequence explains the role of multinational corporations and reveals their questionable business practices overseas during the war.

 
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Posted by on April 17, 2012 in Drama, Global Economy, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts

 

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Millions of Us (1935)

17 Apr

17m

Directors: Slavko Vorkapich (as Jack Smith), Tina Taylor

Synopsis (BAM/PFA): The story of millions of unemployed in the soup kitchen and breadline days vs. the millions still working, personalized in the drama of a young man driven by hunger to become a scab, and whose experiences lead him to recognize his common interests with the strikers and to be converted to trade unionism.

 
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Posted by on April 17, 2012 in Drama, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts

 

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The Ford Massacre (1932)

17 Apr

8m

Producer: Detroit Workers’ Newsreel Special

Synopsis (BAM/PFA): The only newsreel coverage of the historic mass march in downtown Detroit on February 4, 1932, against the starvation program of Hoover/Murphy, and the armed, unprovoked attack by Dearborn police and Ford “guards” on unemployed auto workers at the gates of the River Rouge plant.

 
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Posted by on April 17, 2012 in Documentary, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Manufacturing, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts

 

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2011)

17 Apr

90m

Directors: Judith Ehrlich, Rick Goldsmith

Synopsis (Moyers): The story of Daniel Ellsberg, the Vietnam War strategist-turned whistleblower who leaked the documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times.

Website: http://www.mostdangerousman.org/

 
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Posted by on April 17, 2012 in Documentary, War, Whistleblowers

 

Men and Dust (1940)

15 Apr

17m
Director: Lee Dick
Synopsis (BAM/PFA): An exposé, based on the findings of the Tri-State Survey Committee, of the appalling health conditions and survival problems of the workers in the zinc and lead mining areas at the junction of Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. It shows the fight led by the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union to improve the efforts of mine owners to eliminate silicosis, tuberculosis and lead poisoning.
available on YouTube

 
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Posted by on April 15, 2012 in Available Online, Documentary, Safety & Health, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo)

 

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