97m; Australia
Director: Mark Joffe
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Ben Mendelsohn and Alwyn Kurts
Synopsis (IMDB): An expert on productivity shows wacky workers in 1966 Australia how to run their moccasin factory like clockwork, despite laying off more than half the workforce.
471m
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Synopsis: West German television series on the lives of factory tool makers.
119m; U.S.
Director: John Sayles
Cast: John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, David Strathairn, Christopher Lloyd, Studs Turkel
Synopsis: A dramatization of the Black Sox scandal when the underpaid Chicago White Sox accepted bribes to deliberately lose the 1919 World Series.
103m; France
Director: Xabi Molia
Synopsis: Elsa scrapes through to the end of each month by doing odd jobs. At night, she cleans buses in a deserted coach station, during the day she looks after a child for a young couple. Hoping to land a job with a contract, she attends interviews with disastrous results. Her neighbour Mathieu is also looking for work and seems to have achieved perfection in the art of failing interviews. One day, Elsa is evicted from her flat. She finds herself faced with a life of uncertainty with only a potted plant for company. Mathieu occasionally makes her offers of love that she’s not ready to accept. The temptation to leave it all behind leads Elsa to a forest in which Mathieu has already found refuge and set up camp.
51m; Canada
Director: Min Sook Lee
Synopsis: El Contrato (The Contract) follows Teodoro Bello Martinez, a father of four living in Central Mexico, and several of his countrymen as they make an annual migration to southern Ontario. For eight months of the year the town’s population absorbs 4000 migrant labourers who pick tomatoes for conditions and wages no local will accept. Under a well-meaning government program that allows growers to monitor themselves, the opportunity to exploit workers is as ripe as the fruit they pick. Only men with families to support and no more than an elementary school education need apply. Grievances – among them abusive bosses, unhealthy conditions and paying for benefits they don’t receive – are deflected by a long line of others “back home” who are willing to take their place. Despite a fear of repercussions, the workers voice their desire for dignity and respect, as much as for better working conditions. El Contrato ends as winter closes in and the Mexicans return home. Back in the embrace of their families some pledge, not for the first time and possibly not the last, that it’s their final season in the north. DVD of 2003 original.
141m; U.S.
Director: Gregory Nava
Cast: Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez, David Villalpando and Ernesto Gómez Cruz
Synopsis: Mayan Indian peasants, tired of being thought of as nothing more than “brazos fuertes” (“strong arms”, i.e., manual laborers) and organizing in an effort to improve their lot in life, are discovered by the Guatemalan army. After the army destroys their village and family, a brother and sister, teenagers who just barely escaped the massacre, decide they must flee to “El Norte” (“the North”, i.e., the USA). After receiving clandestine help from friends and humorous advice from a veteran immigrant on strategies for traveling through Mexico, they make their way by truck, bus and other means to Los Angeles, where they try to make a new life as young, uneducated, and undocumented immigrants.
40m; U.S.
Director: The Women’s Film Project
Synopsis: Uses film clips, old photographs, and newsreel footage to trace women’s struggle to attain equal rights in education, employment, politics and in the courts.
80m; U.S.S.R.
Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin, Mikhail Doller
Cast: Vera Baranovskaya, Aleksandr Chistyakov and Ivan Chuvelyov
Synopsis: A peasant comes to St. Petersburg to find work. He unwittingly helps in the arrest of an old village friend who is now a labor leader. The unemployed peasant is also arrested and sent to fight in World War I. After three years, he returns ready for revolution.
76m; Brazil
Director: Gustavo Steinberg
Cast: Rubens de Falco, Leonardo Medeiros, Maria Padilha, Daniela Camargo, Gisella Reiman, Lulu Pavarin, Turíbio Ruiz
Synopsis: Humorous, satirical and cleverly constructed début by Steinberg slowly but surely knots together seven stories from everyday Brazilian life. It all comes down to money, money, money: from the Indians who want to be paid for their rain dance to the politician who just can’t help winning the lottery, time and again.
Contact: Hubert Bals Fund (http://www.fimdalinha.com.br/index_en.html) / Hubert Bals Fund, bits@osfilmes.com.br
52m or 83m;
Director: Robert Nugent
Synopsis: End of the Rainbow provides a concise, in-depth look at the impact of global extractive industries on local populations, their economy, their traditions and their environment. It depicts in striking details the confrontation of two cultures, one indigenous the other a unique reflection of the age of globalization. The film uses a gold mine in Guinea to explore whether concessions granted to transnational corporations are in the interest of the companies, the governing elite or the local community.
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