Filmmakers: Elisabeth Marjanovic ́ Cronvall and Marta Dauliute
Sweden, 2015, Documentary, 15 minutes
Recipe for fascism: Half a generation unemployed, doctors forced to choose whom to treat, social security disappearing, the public on discount.
We ask our friends in Greece to make a list of their images of the euro crisis. It becomes a warning list for the North.
2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival; http://www.bilff.org
Not rated
In Portuguese, with English subtitles
Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes
Workplace tensions intersect with domestic stresses in Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s “Hard Labor,” a tense drama inching toward stark metaphor. Otávio (Marat Descartes) is a middle-aged, middle-class apartment dweller in São Paulo, Brazil, who has just lost an unspecified white-collar job. He receives the news just as his wife, Helena (Helena Albergaria), is trying to get a modest grocery store business off the ground. Parents to a young daughter, they are an affectionate, mutually supportive pair, but the vicissitudes of their struggles exact a cost. Otávio attends a humiliating job interview in which he is questioned while seated opposite two younger men seeking the same position. An employment counselor tells him his search could take a year. Eventually he is reduced to telephone sales, cold calling customers to pitch insurance. His efforts pale beside the troubles of Helena, who faces thieving employees, strained relations with a young housekeeper (Naloana Lima) she has hired, leaky plumbing and something hidden behind a wall at her store that exudes a foul odor and might be alarming a dog across the street. The filmmakers, largely forgoing a soundtrack, skillfully manipulate stillness, silence and anomie to unsettling effect — at times evoking the ambient dread and decay of, say, Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion.” That Mr. Descartes and especially the skilled Ms. Albergaria are devoid of movie star airs elicits our sympathy. As does a lingering shot of a line of applicants for store employment, a group portrait of Brazil’s recessionary casualties.
– New York Times
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEc2_6zHUys
Episode 4 (60 min.)
By 1934 challenges to the New Deal came from both sides of the political spectrum. In California Socialist Upton Sinclair ran for Governor promising to turn idle land and factories into self-governing cooperatives. Sinclair’s campaign ended in defeat, but one year later President Roosevelt’s signing of the Social Security Act signaled America’s emergence as a modern welfare state.
Episode 3 (60 min.)
In his first one hundred days in office, in a effort to stem the effects of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt created many new federal agencies giving jobs and relief to people and transforming the American landscape with public works projects. Nowhere was this transformation more apparent than in Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s New York City. Together Roosevelt and La Guardia expanded and redefined the role of government in the lives of the American people.
In 1932, unemployed veterans marched on Washington, DC demanding payment of a bonus due in the future. The “bonus marchers” were routed by the military on orders of President Hoover. The idea of World War I veterans who had come home as heroes being confronted by the army was a national shock and doomed whatever hope Hoover had for reelection.
105 min – Documentary | Drama | Family – 1 March 2013 (USA)
Directors: Nick Bentgen, Lisa Kjerulff
Writers: Nick Bentgen, Lisa Kjerulff
Set against the backdrop of a town’s annual snowmobile race, this cinematic, observational documentary explores the American working class experience.
NORTHERN LIGHT interweaves the lives of three families in the northwoods of Michigan. Set against the backdrop of a town’s annual snowmobile race, this cinematic, observational documentary explores the American working class experience. As racers and their families pin their hopes to a 500 mile-long test of endurance, small triumphs and giant sacrifices are made along the way. From a frozen corner of the country emerge three American families.
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