Working Class | THE LABOR FILM DATABASE

A Fine Line (2017)

A film by Joanna James

The documentary A Fine Line explores why less than 7% of head chefs and restaurant owners are women, when traditionally women have always held the central role in the kitchen.

Featuring candid interviews with world-renowned chefs including World’s Best Female Chef Dominique Crenn, Emmy Award-winning TV host Lidia Bastianich, two Michelin-starred chef April Bloomfield, Iron Chef Cat Cora, World’s Best Chef Daniel Humm and many more, A Fine Line grapples with themes sparking national conversations right now, including workplace harassment, equal pay, paid parental leave and career advancement.

56 min. | SDH Captions | Scene Selection

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Posted by Labor Film Database on January 14, 2023 in Service Workers, Women, Working Class

9to5: The Story of a Movement

27 Jan

2020 1h 29min | Documentary | 1 February 2021 (USA)

They couldn’t kill their bosses, so they did the next best thing—they organized.

When Dolly Parton sang “9 to 5,” she was doing more than just shining a light on the fate of American working women. Parton was singing the true story of a movement that started with 9to5, a group of Boston secretaries in the early 1970s. Their goals were simple—better pay, more advancement opportunities, and an end to sexual harassment—but their unconventional approach attracted the press and shamed their bosses into change. Featuring interviews with 9to5’s founders, as well as actor and activist Jane Fonda, 9to5: The Story of a Movement is the previously untold story of the fight that inspired a hit and changed the American workplace.

Film website Director: Julia Reichert
julia@donet.com

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Posted by Labor Film Database on January 27, 2021 in A: Highly Recommended Labor Films, A: New/Just Added, Discrimination: Racism, Sexism, etc, Documentary, Labor History, Women, Working Class

Docs & the World

05 Oct

Barcelona blog devoted to social and environmental documentaries.

“We have just started a series of posts about films that deal with the question of work in capitalism. We think these films can help to build up the working class conscience so sorely needed nowadays. Unless there is a new, global working class consciousness, underprivileged classes (increasingly extended) are doomed to be crushed by the sheer destructive power of capitalism. With this post we begin an overview of documentary and fiction films that can help to build up, through denunciation and example, that conscience and solidarity more needed than ever.”

Joan Sole

ducs06@hotmail.com

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Posted by Labor Film Database on October 5, 2019 in A: New/Just Added, Arts/Culture, Communism/Socialism, Documentary, Working Class

The Great Strike 1917

05 Oct

Trailer
70 minutes.

Documentary about events which shaped Australian society and the labor movement for a century and beyond.

Synopsis
Thousands had stopped work, the government recruited volunteers to break the strike, allowing them to bear arms; unions were deregistered and union leaders charged with conspiracy. It was a time of violent emotions, state violence and individual acts of violence by and against strikers. A striker was shot and killed. A filmmaker had his film embargoed. It was Sydney, 1917.

The world was in the grip of “The Great War”. Rail and tram employees had been forced to work longer hours, with reduced wages and conditions. With the introduction of a new American ‘timecard’ system, tramway and railway workers in inner Sydney walked off the job in protest, triggering the strike.

The stoppage became the biggest industrial upheaval Australia has seen before or since. At its height the strike stopped coastal shipping, mining, stevedoring and transport, and involved tens of thousands of workers in Australia’s eastern states.

Despite being a crushing defeat at the time, it had lasting consequences for the Australian labor movement. It was 100 years ago, but personal stories rarely spoken about were to filter through, reflecting on both the trauma and the positive legacy of the event, which still strongly resonate today.

WEBSITE

Mandy King
cavadini@tpg.com.au
M: 0410 633 503

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Posted by Labor Film Database on October 5, 2019 in A: New/Just Added, Documentary, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Transportation, Working Class

Life on the Line

05 Oct

2015 ‧ Drama/Action ‧ 1h 37m

After a family tragedy, Beau Ginner rises to be foreman in a Texas lineman team, upgrading overhead power cables and preventing disasters. However, there is friction when his college-bound niece Bailey’s on-off boyfriend Duncan joins the crew, while another new recruit is hiding PTSD symptoms.

Release date: 2016 (USA)
Director: David Hackl
Music composed by: Jeff Toyne
Executive producers: Chad Dubea, Rosa Morris Peart, Shawn Williamson, Bryant Pike, Jamie Goehring
Producers: Phillip Glasser, Marvin Peart

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/movies/life-on-the-line-review-john-travolta-kate-bosworth.html

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/life-on-the-line-2016

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Posted by Labor Film Database on October 5, 2019 in A: New/Just Added, Construction Trades, Drama, Safety & Health, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Working Class

Mine 9

05 Oct

2019 ‧ Drama ‧ 1h 23m

Miners struggle to survive after an explosion leaves them trapped two miles underground.

Release date: April 12, 2019 (USA)
Director: Eddie Mensore
Music composed by: Mauricio Yazigi
Producer: Eddie Mensore
Screenplay: Eddie Mensore

‘Mine 9’ Review: A Tense Disaster Drama, Undermined by Clichés

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Posted by Labor Film Database on October 5, 2019 in A: New/Just Added, Drama, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Safety & Health, Working Class

Solidarity

05 Oct

Solidarity-FILM-2019

Film about the construction industry blacklist in the UK.

Directed by Lucy Parker
2019; 75 mins

SOLIDARITY is about the secretive methods used against UK activists and trade unionists. Blacklisted construction workers and activists spied on by the police share their ongoing struggles.

Blacklisting in the UK construction industry impacted thousands of workers who were labelled ‘troublemakers’ for speaking out and secretively denied employment. Activists uncovered alarming links between workplace blacklisting and undercover policing. SOLIDARITY attentively follows meetings between activists and law students, brought together for the film, revealing the determination of a community working together to find a route to justice.

The first feature length film from artist filmmaker Lucy Parker, Solidarity has been made alongside and features members of Blacklist Support Group, core participants in Undercover Policing Inquiry, and members of other campaigning groups including Voice of Domestic Workers, Cleaners and Allied Independent Workers Union, Independent Workers of Great Britain, GMB, RMT, Unite British Airways Mixed Fleet, County Durham Teaching Assistants, BECTU Picturehouse and many individual trade unionists.

Funded by Arts Council England, Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust, Lipman Miliband Trust, Kingston University and donations from trade union branches and individuals.

Info and a trailer here: https://vimeo.com/331182945

WEBSITE
CONTACT INFO
City Projects
46 Brookbys’s Walk, London, E9 6DA
0781 306 2595

www.cityprojects.org

Email: info@cityprojects.org
Twitter: @solidarity_film

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Posted by Labor Film Database on October 5, 2019 in A: New/Just Added, Construction Trades, Discrimination: Racism, Sexism, etc, Documentary, Organizing, Working Class

Sorry We Missed You

05 Oct

2019 ‧ Drama ‧ 1h 40m

Ricky and his family have been fighting an uphill struggle against debt since the 2008 financial crash. An opportunity to wrestle back some independence appears with a shiny new van and the chance to run a franchise as a self-employed delivery driver. It’s hard work, and his wife’s job as a carer is no easier. The family unit is strong but when both are pulled in different directions everything comes to breaking point.

Initial release: May 16, 2019 (France)
Director: Ken Loach
Producer: Rebecca O’Brien
Screenplay: Paul Laverty
Nominations: Palme d’Or, Cannes Best Actress Award, MORE
Production companies: Wild Bunch, Why Not Productions, Sixteen Films

Sorry We Missed You review – Ken Loach’s superb swipe at zero-hours Britain

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Posted by Labor Film Database on October 5, 2019 in A: New/Just Added, Construction Trades, Drama, Temp/Precarious work, Transportation, Working Class, zero hours work

PETERLOO

24 Dec

Internationally acclaimed and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mike Leigh portrays one of the bloodiest episodes in British history, the infamous Peterloo Massacre of 1819, where government-backed cavalry charged into a peaceful crowd of 80,000 that gathered in Manchester, England to demand democratic reform.

The film Peterloo will mark the 200th anniversary of the notorious Peterloo Massacre.

On 16 August 1819, a crowd of some 60,000 people from Manchester and surrounding towns gathered in St Peter’s Fields to demand Parliamentary reform and an extension of voting rights. The meeting had been peaceful but in the attempt to arrest a leader of the meeting, the armed government militias panicked and charged upon the crowd. The toll of casualties has always been disputed, but as many as 15 people were killed and up to 700 wounded. The immediate effect of the massacre was a crackdown on reform, as the authorities feared the country was heading towards armed rebellion. However, the outcry led to the founding of the Manchester Guardian and played a significant role in the passage through Parliament of the Great Reform Act 13 years later.
The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 had resulted in periods of famine and chronic unemployment, exacerbated by the introduction of the first of the Corn Laws. By the beginning of 1819, the pressure generated by poor economic conditions, coupled with the relative lack of suffrage in Northern England, had enhanced the appeal of political radicalism. In response, the Manchester Patriotic Union, a group agitating for parliamentary reform, organised a demonstration to be addressed by the well-known radical orator Henry Hunt.

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Posted by Labor Film Database on December 24, 2018 in Drama, Labor History, Unemployment-Wages, Working Class

They Don’t Wear Black Tie (1981) Eles Não Usam Black-Tie

23 Dec

2h | Drama | 18 April 1982 (USA)

Brazilian drama film directed by Leon Hirszman, based on Gianfrancesco Guarnieri’s play of the same name. Union leader’s son doesn’t want to engage in a strike, because his wife is pregnant, thus disregarding his father’s tradition of political activism. The film revolves around a working-class family in São Paulo in 1980. Otávio, a syndicalist leader, and Romana are the parents of Tião, whose girlfriend, Maria, becomes pregnant. Fearing to be fired and thus unable to support his now fiancée, Tião does not participate on a strike, which starts a series of family conflicts.

Full film here