Unemployment-Wages | THE LABOR FILM DATABASE

Professional Revolutionary: The Life of Saul Wellman (2004)

65m; U.S.

Director: Judith Montell & Ronald Aronson

Synopsis (Wikipedia): Under-educated, Wellman fought in the army, worked in a car factory for Ford and was employed at a printing company; Wellman fought against Fascism in both the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Wellman returned home at the start of the Cold War, to help organize and lead the Communist Party in America. Then when the 60s came along, Wellman latched onto the civil rights movement. The documentary deals with wheelchair-using Wellman, during the last years of his life, at an Iraq war protest. Throughout his life, Wellman was an organizer and passionate speaker.

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Posted by Metro Council on April 26, 2012 in Documentary, Labor History, Organizing, Politics, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Unemployment-Wages, War, Working Class

Promises to Keep (1988)

26 Apr

57m; U.S.

Director: Ginny Durrin

Cast: Martin Sheen, Mitch Snyder

Synopsis: Documentary about the work of homeless advocate Mitch Snyder and the Community for Creative Non-Violence during the 1980s in response to rising homelessness and federal housing cuts.

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Posted by Metro Council on April 26, 2012 in Documentary, Organizing, Unemployment-Wages

La Raison du Plus Faible (2006)

26 Apr

116m; France

Director: Lucas Belvaux

Cast: Eric Caravaca, Lucas Belvaux and Claude Semal

Synopsis: Laid-off French steelworkers turn to crime. Explores frustrations of men who find themselves no longer useful members of society but takes a fatal turn into a robbery/thriller and deteriorates into pointless violence.

Contact: almost forgot to mention one film (an excellent fit!!): LA RAISON DU PLUS FAIBLE, by Lucas Belvaux. It is distributed in the US, but there’s no print for now, but there should be one for the fall. You can contact Wendy Lidell on my behalf if you don’t know her at International Film Circuit: 212.777.5690 or wlidell@infc.us. If she doesn’t have a print by then, I might be able to get one from France. – I almost forgot to mention one film (an excellent fit!!): LA RAISON DU PLUS FAIBLE, by Lucas Belvaux. It is distributed in the US, but there’s no print for now, but there should be one for the fall. You can contact Wendy Lidell on my behalf if you don’t know her at International Film Circuit: 212.777.5690 or wlidell@infc.us. If she doesn’t have a print by then, I might be able to get one from France.

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Posted by Metro Council on April 26, 2012 in Crime-Action, Drama, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Unemployment-Wages

Riff – Raff (1991)

26 Apr

96m; U.K.

Director: Ken Loach

Synopsis: The story of Stevie, a construction worker, and his girlfriend, an unemployed pop singer, serves to show the living conditions of the British working class

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Posted by Metro Council on April 26, 2012 in Construction Trades, Drama, Unemployment-Wages, Working Class

Rising Son (1990)

26 Apr

92m; U.S.

Director: John David Coles

Cast: Brian Dennehy, Piper Laurie and Graham Beckel

Synopsis (IMDB): A factory foreman with 36 years experience becomes despondent after being laid off by his company which has just been taken over by a Japanese conglomerate and is unable to find any other work. Meanwhile, his son uses his father’s unemployment as an excuse to drop out of the pre-med program his father pressured him to enter.

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Posted by Metro Council on April 26, 2012 in Drama, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Manufacturing, Unemployment-Wages, Working Class

Rosetta (1999)

26 Apr

92m; Belguim

Director: Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne

Cast: Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione and Anne Yernaux

Synopsis: Young and impulsive Rosetta lives with her alcoholic mother and, moved by despair, she will do anything to maintain a job. Set in Belgium. Both film and actress won major prizes in Cannes.

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Posted by Metro Council on April 26, 2012 in Drama, Unemployment-Wages, Women, Working Class

Saturday’s Children (1940)

26 Apr

102m; U.S.

Director: Vincent Sherman

Cast: John Garfield, Anne Shirley and Claude Rains

Synopsis (IMDB): Pretty Bobby Halevy loves Rims Rosson, a dreamer and inventor without much going for him. Rims has a scheme of going to Manila to turn hemp into silk and become rich. But when one of her family talks Bobby into tricking Rims into marriage, the real world comes crashing down on the couple

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Posted by Metro Council on April 26, 2012 in Drama, Unemployment-Wages, Working Class

Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags (2009)

26 Apr

75m; U.S.

Director: Marc Levin

Synopsis: Schmatta documents the current post-crash economy. We hear from freshly unemployed workers who put on a brave face, preserve their humour and try to make sense of the changing landscape. The shops stemming off Seventh Avenue that once hummed with sewing machines are being converted for upscale renters. If this gargantuan industry can be reduced to such a fraction, what does it mean for the rest of us?

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Posted by Metro Council on April 26, 2012 in Documentary, Unemployment-Wages

Land of Destiny (2010)

20 Apr

78m; U.S.

Director: Brett Story

Synopsis: A hard-working petrochemical town is rocked by revelations that its workers suffer an epidemic of cancers. But even more terrifying is the looming spectre of deindustrialization and joblessness. In the rich fabric of the city’s landscape – rows of boarded storefronts, the bright sprawl of petrochemical plants and the swollen rooms of hospital wards and crowded bars – one finds a microcosm of the 21st century. Tattooed men serving fries, basement musicians, boilermakers and volunteer firemen, heartbroken widows and an optimistic mayor – the lives of a diverse medley of characters intersect to reveal the dramas and contradictions of an industrial town out of sync with a post-industrial world. As the dystopian architecture of the petrochemical plants, squatted like crushed space stations just meters away from homes and schoolyards, give way to the spaces that make this city a community, we begin to see what it is that everyone seems so afraid to lose. A portrait of a working-class city in paralysis and a mediation on work and place in the modern economy, Land of Destiny offers a poignant and universal story about work, community, and struggle in an era of globalization.

Contact: http://www.bunburyfilms.com/films/trailer/doc/lod.html

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Posted by Metro Council on April 20, 2012 in Documentary, Global Economy, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Unemployment-Wages, Working Class