25m; France
Synopsis: This is one of the first documentaries ever made that show the lives of coal miners and their families. This film is a social documentary describing the fate of some 15,000 miners in the Borinage, who in 1932 staged a strike in protest against the announcement by Belgian mine-owners of a 5% cut in wages. The film is still extremely moving and portrays men who were often treated worse than animals.
93m; U.S.
Director: James Keach
Cast: Faith Ford, Tim Matheson and Florence Henderson
Synopsis (IMDB): She was an overworked mom trying to get her family’s attention. She didn’t know she would become a national sensation.
124m; U.S.
Director: Martin Ritt
Cast: Sean Connery, Richard Harris and Samantha Eggar
Synopsis (IMDB): Life is rough in the coal mines of 1876 Pennsylvania. A secret group of Irish emigrant miners, known as the Molly Maguires, fights against the cruelty of the mining company with sabotage and murder. A detective, also an Irish emigrant, is hired to infiltrate the group and report on its members. But on which side do his sympathies lie?
88m; U.S.
Director: Joseph Seiden
Cast: Chaim Tauber, Seymour Rechzeit and Yetta Zwerling
Synopsis (IMDB): Motl, a poor laborer, loving husband and new father, leads cloakmakers in a strike for better working conditions. When he is severely injured by strikebreakers, his wife, Esther, and infant son are left destitute. Desperate to save her starving child, Esther gives him up for adoption to a wealthy couple, and then commits suicide.
Contact: Based on a play by Chaim Tauber Music by Sholem Secunda Yiddish with New English Subtitles; two suggestions from the National Center for Jewish film sharon rivo ncjf@brandeis.edu; co sponsor with Josh Speisier and teh DCJCC screening room;http://www.jewishfilm.org/motl.html
90m; U.S.S.R.
Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin
Synopsis: Set in Russia during the harsh winter of 1905. A mother finds herself caught in emotional conflict between her husband and son when they find themselves on opposite sides of a worker’s strike. The son is a supporter of the workers but the father has been blackmailed into supporting the bosses and blacklegs. Despite the grief which follows the mother gradually comes to support the strikers and eventually is prepared to risk everything in standing up to police and Cossak troops in a demonstration endangering both herself and her precious son.
60m; U.S.
Director: Harold Meyer
Synopsis: This roaring railroad film (1968) reveals the incredible history of railroading from the 1830s until today. The Hell on Wheels towns, the Chinese and Irish immigrants building a railroad with their sweat and brawn but battling each other along the way, the robber barons and their union busting, Mr. Pullman and his Pullman car, the glitter of the “golden age”, Eugene V. Debs, the glory days of the passenger trains of the 1930s and 40s.
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