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Category Archives: Themes

Ditching the Fear (2015)

16 Feb

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)

 

 

 
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Posted by on February 16, 2017 in Documentary, Manufacturing, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo)

 

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry (2014)

18 Dec
Filmmaker Mary Dore chronicles the events, the movers and the shakers of the feminist movement from 1966 to 1971.
Release date: November 13, 2014 (Salt Lake City)
Director: Mary Dore
Music composed by: Mark Degli Antoni
Producers: Mary Dore, Nancy Kennedy
Cinematography: Svetlana Cvetko, Alicia Weber

SHE’S BEAUTIFUL WHEN SHE’S ANGRY resurrects the buried history of the outrageous, often brilliant women who founded the modern women’s movement from 1966 to 1971.   SHE’S BEAUTIFUL takes us from the founding of NOW, with ladies in hats and gloves, to the emergence of more radical factions of women’s liberation; from intellectuals like Kate Millett to the street theatrics of W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Conspiracy from Hell!).  Artfully combining dramatizations, performance and archival imagery, the film recounts the stories of women who fought for their own equality, and in the process created a world-wide revolution.

SHE’S BEAUTIFUL does not try to romanticize the early movement, but dramatizes it in its exhilarating, quarrelsome, sometimes heart-wrenching glory.   The film does not shy away from the controversies over race, sexual preference and leadership that arose in the women’s movement.  SHE’S BEAUTIFUL WHEN SHE’S ANGRY captures the spirit of the time — thrilling, scandalous, and often hilarious.

That story still resonates today for women who are facing new challenges around reproductive rights and sexual violence, as the film shows present-day activists creating their generation’s own version of feminism. SHE’S BEAUTIFUL WHEN SHE’S ANGRY is a film about activists, made to inspire women and men to work for feminism and human rights.

 
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Posted by on December 18, 2016 in Women

 

Robot Somnambulism (2016)

18 Dec

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?

 
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Posted by on December 18, 2016 in Automation, Consumerism, Documentary, Global Economy, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Manufacturing, Safety & Health, Technology

 

Deepwater Horizon (2016)

18 Dec

Director: Peter Berg

Writers: Matthew Michael Carnahan (screenplay), Matthew Sand (screenplay) |3 more credits »

Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, Douglas M. Griffin

A Hollywood thriller recreates the 2010 disaster in which a BP oil rig caught on fire and exploded, killing 11 people and releasing tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. High-level acting and special effects help tell the story of BP’s greed that led to the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
 
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Posted by on December 18, 2016 in Construction Trades, Drama, Environment, Safety & Health

 

When Two Worlds Collide

18 Dec
An indigenous environmental activist takes on the large businesses that are destroying the Amazon.
Initial release: January 22, 2016
Directors: Heidi Brandenburg, Mathew Orzel
Producer: Taira Akbar
Website

Backed by a “free trade” agreement with the U.S., the president of Peru launched a plan to turn over indigenous Amazonian land to big corporations for mining and oil and gas extraction. Indigenous communities fought back. The filmmakers immersed themselves in this drama and produced incredible footage showing the courage and sacrifice of the native people, juxtaposed with the familiar invoking of “progress” and “the rule of the law” by the corporations’ allies in government.

 

 
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Posted by on December 18, 2016 in Big Business/Corporations, Documentary, Environment, Global Economy, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing

 

Lamb (2015)

18 Dec
Initial release: November 26, 2015 (Germany)
Director: Yared Zeleke
Music composed by: Christophe Chassol
Cast: Kidist Siyum, Wolela Assefa, Rediat Amare, Rahel Teshome, More
Screenplay: Yared Zeleke, Géraldine Bajard
Producers: Johannes Rexin, Laurent Lavolé, Ama Ampadu

A beautiful Ethiopian feature film tells the story of two characters who don’t fit into traditional rural life in that country. One is a young boy more adept at cooking than typically male tasks. The other is an outspoken teenage girl who is being drawn into local radical political debates.

 
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Posted by on December 18, 2016 in Children, Documentary, Farm & Food, Politics, Women

 

Hidden Figures (2016)

18 Dec
Release date: December 25, 2016 (USA)
Director: Theodore Melfi
Screenplay: Theodore Melfi, Allison Schroeder
Production companies: 20th Century Fox, TSG Entertainment, Chernin Entertainment
Producers: Pharrell Williams, Donna Gigliotti, Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping

HIDDEN FIGURES is the incredible untold story of Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe)—brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation’s confidence, turned around the Space Race, and galvanized the world. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.

 
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Posted by on December 18, 2016 in Discrimination: Racism, Sexism, etc, Drama, White Collar, Women

 

The Workers Cup (2016)

18 Dec

United Kingdom (Director: Adam Sobel) — Inside Qatar’s labor camps, African and Asian migrant workers building the facilities of the 2022 World Cup compete in a football tournament of their own. World Premiere. DAY ONE

 
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Posted by on December 18, 2016 in Blacks, Class, Documentary, Global Economy, Immigrants/Immigration, Migrant workers

 

Plastic China (2016)

18 Dec

China (Director: Jiu-liang Wang) — Yi-Jie, an 11-year-old girl, works alongside her parents in a recycling facility while dreaming of attending school. Kun, the facility’s ambitious foreman, dreams of a better life. Through the eyes and hands of those who handle its refuse, comes an examination of global consumption and culture. International Premiere. THE NEW CLIMATE

 
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Posted by on December 18, 2016 in Consumerism, Documentary, Environment, Global Economy, Immigrants/Immigration, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Migrant workers

 

Machines (2016)

18 Dec

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

 
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Posted by on December 18, 2016 in Automation, Documentary, Manufacturing, Technology, Textile Industry

 
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