112 mins; 2010
By Allan Sekula and Noël Burch
Film website
Investigates global maritime trade, highlighting displaced farmers and villagers in Holland, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles and Filipino maids in China. Sekula and Burch offer a sobering portrait of workers’ conditions, the inhuman scale of sea trade and the secret lives of port cities.
(27 min) by Pradeep Indulkar, India
This powerful film is about the lives of workers and the community at the Tarapur nuclear power plant, which was built fifty years ago in a poor rural community. Like other nuclear power plants around the world, people in the community were displaced and provided no real compensation but they were promised good jobs.
This, like the other promises according to the people of Tarapur, turned out to be a lie. They also become the victims of diseases directly caused by radiation and other toxins brought into their community by the plant
Their community, their lives and their work turn into a nightmare they are struggling against as are communities where nuclear plants have been built.
The U.S. entry into World War II created an unprecedented demand for new workers. Thousands of posters and billboards appeared calling on women to “Do the Job He Left Behind.” Rosie the Riveter was born — the symbol of working women during World War II. The story is told by the women themselves, five former “Rosies,” who movingly recall their histories working in Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco during the war. Their testimony is interwoven with rare archival recruitment films, stills, posters, ads and music from the period, which contrast their experiences with the popular legend and mythology of Rosie the Riveter.
Directed by: Connie Field
(Regan Brashear, 2013, 60 min) A closer look at the drive to be “better than human” and the radical technological innovations that may take us there.
http://www.fixedthemovie.com
Directed by: Tom Heinemann
Documentary Feature (57 minutes)
A Killer Bargain refers to the availability of cheap consumer goods, imported by Western companies, whose prices don’t reflect the human and environmental costs of their production. Consumers remain unaware of the conditions under which the goods they buy are produced. This film makes those connections shockingly clear. Would you buy that batik tablecloth if you knew the children making it were working with cancer-causing solutions everyday?
Jacob Kornbluth, 2013, 89 min
Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich looks to raise awareness of the country’s widening economic gap.
By NEIL GENZLINGER in The New York Times
Published: December 16, 2013
This has been a year of notable 50th anniversaries, but time didn’t begin in 1963. A sorrowful PBS documentary on Tuesday night notes the 100th anniversary of an event forgotten by much of the country but not by the people of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: a miners’ strike that led to a catastrophic stampede in which 73 people died, most of them children.
The program, “Red Metal: The Copper Country Strike of 1913,” is fairly generic as documentaries go, but in an age of battles over the minimum wage and concern about the distribution of wealth, it resonates. An organizing effort by the Western Federation of Miners led miners in and around Calumet to strike in July, and the companies (the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company was the biggest) were unyielding.
Wages — $3 a day — were an issue, and so was a new one-man drilling machine. Previously miners had worked in pairs, and they saw the new technology as both costing jobs and increasing risk in an already dangerous profession, since without a partner an injured miner could go without aid for hours.
At first the workers and their families plunged into the strike with an enthusiasm that is seldom seen in today’s more timid labor groups, and women took an uncharacteristically vocal role, partly in the hope that company enforcers wouldn’t beat them the way they were beating their husbands.
“These women would be out there shouting rude things that women shouldn’t be saying,” notes Alison K. Hoagland, a historian. “They would dip their brooms in the outhouse and smear the strikebreakers with it.”
On Christmas Eve an ugly strike turned far uglier when, at a party for miners’ children in a building known as the Italian Hall, someone — a prankster? a strikebreaker? — yelled fire. There was no fire, but there was a deadly stampede.
Steve Earle sings Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre” to end the film. In a new age of inequality, it feels like both a remembrance and a warning of what happens when opposing sides won’t talk.
Dir: Sam Newman and Susan Sipprelle
US, documentary
66m
http://www.overfiftyandoutofwork.com/videos/documentary/
Follows three Baby Boomers who attempt to recover from the devastating impact of losing their jobs during the Great Recession. The film shows their struggle to hang onto their homes, health insurance, and hope. Over time, the three boomers learn to cope with unemployment’s drastic effects on their lives, including the loss of economic security and ultimately their loss of confidence in the American Dream.
Susan Sipprelle <susansipprelle@gmail.com>
84m; U.S.
Director: Hal Hartley
Cast: Bill Sage, Sabrina Lloyd and Tatiana Abracos
Synopsis (IMDB): In the not-distant-future, the market has taken over everything, thanks to the marketers. The consumer is king, and those who see value outside of the marketplace are “enemies of the consumer”, terrorists, and “partisan” enemies that the state must dispose of. Protagonist Jack seems to be at one with the media corporations (after all, his marketing ideas led to the institutionalization of the exchange of sex for enhanced buying power), but is he somehow involved with the feeble and pathetic resistance movement? Does he love Cecile, his colleague, or is she a pawn in his game? And what of the mysterious girl from Monday? Are immigrants from the star system “Monday” really assisting the partisans?
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