345m; France
Director: Peter Watkins
Cast: Eliane Annie Adalto, Pierre Barbieux and Bernard Bombeau
Synopsis: A miniseries following children, women, shopkeepers & nuns reveal fascinating historical detail of the 1871 Paris Commune by sharing their opinions of the political climate.
20m; U.S.
Director: Workers Film and Photo League
Synopsis: Depression-era film of Communist Rallies in Michigan
183m; U.K.
Director: Bill Douglas
Cast: Keith Allen, Dave Atkins and Stephen Bateman
Synopsis: The story of “The Tolpuddle Martyrs”. A group of 19th century English farm labourers who formed one of the first trade unions and started a campaign to receive fair wages.
90m; Bolivia
Director: Jorge Sanjinés
Synopsis: Dramatic reconstruction of 1967 massacre of striking Bolivian tin miners.
92m; Argentina
Director: Hugo del Carril
Synopsis: The brothers Santos and Rufino Peralta (of Carril and Laxalt) are used like animals in the workplace at the Parana Stop. There they encounter enormous hardship and inhuman conditions of work as a consequence of the immense greed of the managers. A worker’s rebellion is maturing, to the point that it is developed into trade union of workers who respond against their grief. Finally, the workers plot a counterattack and punish their corrupt employers.
28m
Synopsis (AFSC): Produced by supporters of the strike by workers at the A.E. Staley corn sweetener plant in Decatur, IL, this program is an excellent review of the basic grievances behind the decision to strike. Shows that because of corporate attitudes about the dangerous chemicals used at the plant, the Staley company is becoming dangerous to the health and safety of its 800 workers and the community around it. Interviews with workers who talk about the horrors of a particular incident are a powerful indictment of corporate greed and indifference. Excellent sections on the hidden corporate web of control that Staley is part of and on issues of health and safety in the workplace. Can be followed up with Struggle in the Heartland.
30m; U.S.
Director: Bernard Sanders and Nancy Barnett
Synopsis: Biography of Eugene V. Debs and his relation to unionism and American social history.
47m; Canada
Director: Marta Nielsen-Hastings, David Wesley, Micheal Allder
Synopsis: On July 14, 1946, a group of steelworkers poured out of Hamilton’s Playhouse Theatre and set up pickets around the country’s largest steel mill. Their action sparked one of the most important strikes in our country’s history – a strike which many consider to be the birth of the modern labour movement.
Contact: National Film Board of Canada
http://www.onf-nfb.gc.ca/eng/collection/film/?id=33367
105m; USSR
Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin
Cast: Boris Livanov, Vasili Kovrigin and Aleksandr Chistyakov
Synopsis (IMDB): A wise and forgiving communist leader decides to send a young worker, Karl Renn, as an international delegate to the Soviet Union after the worker had deserted a picket-line and had expressed doubts about the methods of class struggle in in his own country
20m; U.S.
Director: Workers Film and Photo League
Synopsis: The only newsreel coverage of the historic mass march in downtown Detroit in 1932, against the policies of Hoover, and the armed attack by Dearborn police and Ford guards at the unemployed workers at teh gates of the River Rouge plant.
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 