1h 25m A group of illegal construction workers, left without money and basic rights, fight their bosses with all they have left, building a hoax “Potemkin’s village” to con a development fund. Close to deadline it’s a fight for life and death.
The Chicago Haymarket tragedy, where a bomb thrown into the ranks of Police was followed by an eruption of panic and violence resulting in a trial and execution of presumably innocent workers’ rights activists, is examined in this feature documentary film. Expert historians and professors present the history of the bomb, the anarchist movement of the 19th century, and the labor struggle of working people fighting for a shorter work day during the industrial might of America’s Gilded Age.
In search of a subject for their film, a group of directors ask passers-by about their expectations of Moroccan cinema in the streets and bars of Casablanca.
1h 13m The film is a kaleidoscopic gaze on the exploitative working conditions experienced by migrant domestic workers hired under the Kafala system in Lebanon. Meagre wages, manipulation and a room without windows. Lebanon’s countless maids fight back against the mechanisms of modern slavery.
“The old American dream just seems to be gone,” says Walt Hill, a longtime United Steelworkers Union member and the Contract Coordinator for Local 1196 in the decaying steel town of Brackenridge, Pennsylvania. Local 1196 takes the viewer on the ground as days on strike turn to weeks, weeks turn to months, and union leaders realize they’re playing with a short stack, and against long odds.
‘Foreign Parts’ portrays a hidden enclave of automobile shops and junk-yards fated for demolition in the shadow of a new baseball stadium in Queens. The film observes this vibrant community of immigrants – where wrecks, refuse, and recycling form a thriving commerce – as it struggles for daily survival and contests New York City’s development scheme.
Romanian New Wave auteur Cristian Mungiu (“4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days”) returns to masterful form with this drama, set in the filmmaker’s homeland and focusing on Matthias (Marin Grigore), a man who returns to his small village after walking off his slaughterhouse job in Germany, only to find the townspeople roiled by the presence of foreign workers. Ann Hornaday writes: “So much fear and misplaced anger are at play in Matthias’s increasingly hysterical behavior that ‘R.M.N.’ might as well be an X-ray of contemporary America.” (PG-13, 106 minutes.)
Based on French journalist Florence Aubenas’s bestselling non-fiction work Le Quai de Ouistreham, investigating rising precarity in French society through her experiences in the northern port city of Caen.
An overworked and underpaid production assistant drives around Bucharest to shoot the casting for a workplace safety video commissioned by a multinational company.