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Category Archives: Themes

Tokyo Sonata (2009)

121m; Japan

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Cast: Teruyuki Kagawa (Ryuhei Sasaki), Kyoko Koizumi (Megumi Sasaki), Yu Koyanagi (Takashi Sasaki), Kai Inowaki (Kenji Sasaki), Haruka Igawa (Kaneko), Kanji Tsuda (Kurosu), Koji Yakusho (Thief)

Synopsis (IMDB): An ordinary Japanese family slowly disintegrates after its patriarch loses his job at a prominent company.

Contact: Regent Releasing 310-806-4288 info@regentreleasing.com http://www.regentreleasing.com

 

 

Toni (1935)

81m; France

Director: Jean Renoir

Cast: Charles Blavette, Celia Montalván and Jenny Hélia

Synopsis (IMDB): In the 1920s, the Provence is a magnet for immigrants seeking work in the quarries or in the agriculture. Many mingle with locals and settle down permanently – like Toni, an Italian who has moved in with Marie, a Frenchwoman. Even a well-ordered existence is not immune from boredom, friendship, love, or enmity, and Toni gets entangled in a web of increasingly passionate relationships. For there is his best pal Fernand, but also Albert, his overbearing foreman; there is Sebastian, a steady Spanish peasant, but also Gabi, his young rogue relative; there is Marie, but there is also Josefa.

 

Totally Connected (2006)

4m; 

Director: Randy  Brown

Synopsis: Overwork Overbearing supervision Invasion of privacy (including GPS tracking) Impact of technology.

Contact: Randy Brown randy@brownragfilms.com 512-698-7328

 
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Posted by on June 13, 2012 in Documentary, Technology

 

Trace of Stones (1966)

139m; East Germany

Director: Frank Beyer

Cast: Manfred Krug, Krystyna Stypulkowska and Jutta Hoffmann

Synopsis (IMDB): Hannes Balla is the foreman of a group of building construction workers at the large construction site “Schkona” in the GDR. They spend most of their time working hard and drinking harder – to some they are fun, to some they are a public nuisance. Things get more complicated when the good-looking Kati Klee is employed as a young technician, and the ambitious new Party Secretary, Werner Horrath, aims to boost work efficiency and downsize Balla’s ego. Kati slowly warms up to Werner, but is also attracted to Balla’s nonconformity. A contemporary movie about work, love, and everything in between.

 

Tower Colliery (2008)

11m; U.K.

Director: Claire Pollak

Synopsis: The success story of miners who pooled their redundancy money to purchase the land and mine to run Tower Colliery as a workers’ co-operative.

Contact: Brought to our attention in 2010 by: Nicola Seyd for London Socialist Film Co-op nseyd@hotmail.com

 
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Posted by on June 13, 2012 in Documentary, Organizing

 

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Trade Secrets-The Hidden Costs of the FTAA (2002)

16m; U.S.

Director: Jeremy Blasi

Synopsis: Examination of the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

 
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Posted by on June 13, 2012 in Documentary, Global Economy

 

Trading Places (1983)

116m; U.S.

Director: John Landis

Cast: Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd and Ralph Bellamy

Synopsis (IMDB): Louis Winthorpe is a businessman who works for commodities brokerage firm of Duke and Duke owned by the brothers Mortimer and Randolph Duke. Now they bicker over the most trivial of matters and what they are bickering about is whether it’s a person’s environment or heredity that determines how well they will do in life. When Winthorpe bumps into Billy Ray Valentine, a street hustler and assumes he is trying to rob him, he has him arrested. Upon seeing how different the two men are, the brothers decide to make a wager as to what would happen if Winthorpe loses his job, his home and is shunned by everyone he knows and if Valentine was given Winthorpe’s job. So they proceed to have Winthorpe arrested and to be placed in a compromising position in front of his girlfriend. So all he has to rely on is the hooker who was hired to ruin him.

 

 

Transnational Tradeswomen (2006)

2006, 62 minutes, Color, DVD, Thai, Chinese, Tamil, Urdu, Japanese, SubtitledtransnationalTradeswomen2
available from Women Make Movies
Inspired by organizers at the Beijing Conference on Women in 1995, former construction worker Vivian Price spent years documenting the current and historical roles of women in the construction industry in Asia – discovering several startling facts. Capturing footage that shatters any stereotypes of delicate, submissive Asian women, Price discovers that women in many parts of Asia have been doing construction labor for centuries. But conversations with these women show that development and the resulting mechanization are pushing them out of the industry. Their stories disturb the notion of “progress” that many people hold and show how globalization, modernization, education and technology don’t always result in gender equality and the alleviation of poverty.Celebrating a range of women workers – from a Japanese truck driver, to two young Pakistani women working on a construction site in Lahore, to a Taiwanese woman doing concrete work alongside her husband – this film deftly probes the connections in their experiences. In a segment exploring the history of the Samsui women in Singapore (Chinese women who were recruited as construction laborers in the 1920’s until they lost their jobs to mechanization in the 1970’s) unique archival footage and interviews with surviving Samsui offer an importation perspective on the historical and global scope of women workers’ struggles.

 

The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal (1979)

120m; U.S.

Director: Mel Stuart

Cast: David Dukes, Tovah Feldshuh and Lauren Frost

Synopsis (IMDB): The story of a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist building in New York City in 1911 that resulted in the deaths of 146 employees, mostly young women. The ensuing investigation revealed the company’s almost total disregard for its workers’ safety in pursuit of increased production and profits, and resulted, among other things, in the passage of new worker safety laws.

 

The Triangle Fire

52m; U.S.

Director: Roy Campolongo

Synopsis: The Triangle Fire documentary chronicles those remarkable times, when the rising forces of industry converged with the greatest mass migration in history. We explore the dramatic events of the late 19th, and early 20th century labor movement, that reached a crescendo with the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911. This film examines the relationship between New York’s rapidly growing metropolis, corrupt political infrastructure, an industry’s desire for profit, and the human rights of its workers. Furthermore, the documentary investigates how we have adapted today, to those epic events that would forever change the fabric of our nation.  Part of PBS’ “American Experience” series.

Contact: View online here: http://video.pbs.org/video/1817898383