101m; France
Director: Julien Duvivier
Synopsis: Five unemployed workers unsuccessfully attempt to pool resources to get a music hall running.
Category Archives: Working Class
La Bete Humiaine (1938)
90m; France
Director: Jean Renoir
Synopsis: Railroad workers and love, lust, and the murder.
La Ciudad (The City) [1999]
88m; U.S.
Director: David Riker
Synopsis: Construction workers/immigrant workers.
La Promesse
92m; Belgium
Director: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Cast: Jérémie Renier, Olivier Gourmet and Assita Ouedraogo
Synopsis: Igor and his father, Roger, are making a decent living renting apartments to illegal immigrants and sometimes working them illegally (among other scams). But when the building inspector pays a surprise visit and Amidou falls off a scaffold in his hurry to hide, things start to unravel, particularly when Igor makes a promise to the injured Amidou that ultimately exposes the different values of Igor and Roger, and of Amidou’s wife, Assita.
La Terra Trema (1948)
160m; Italy
Director: Luchino Visconti
Cast: Luchino Visconti, Antonio Pietrangeli and Antonio Arcidiacono
Synopsis: In rural Sicily, the fishermen live at the mercy of the greedy wholesalers. One family risks everything to buy their own boat and operate independently.
The Labor Movement: Beginnings and Growth in America (1959)
14m; U.S.
Director: Coronet Films
Synopsis: Developments in labor’s organization in the US from 1873 through the merger of the AFL and CIO. The role played by Samuel Gompers, the Knights of Labor and the AFL-CIO are traced.
Labor’s Reward (1925)
Synopsis (National Film Preservation Foundation):
Produced by the American Federation of Labor, Labor’s Reward is probably the earliest surviving film sponsored by an American labor union. Although only the third of five reels survives (along with a shorter fragment), the reel makes for a relatively self-contained story. In the lost earlier reels a father is injured at a nonunion machine shop. Receiving no workers’ compensation, his family must rely on the wages of the elder daughter, Mary, who toils at a nonunion bookbindery. As reel 3 begins, friend Tom finds Mary bedridden from overwork.
When Labor’s Reward was made in 1925, the American labor movement was struggling after the suppression of more militant unions. Labor’s Reward was intended to turn the situation around by demonstrating the AFL’s “constructive methods” and by appealing to “the purchasing public” to buy union-made products. With its female focus, the film also addressed the AFL’s history of regarding women workers as low-paid competitors. It is women who here show Tom the importance of buying a hat with a union label. Widely advertised, Labor’s Reward was screened for free. The AFL-affiliated American Federation of Musicians provided the live accompaniment.
http://www.filmpreservation.org/dvds-and-books/clips/labor-s-reward-1925
Labour Days (2007)
29m; Canada
Director: Stuart Cryer
Synopsis: Workers, living in company town, organize.
Contact: Stuart Cryer terraV@cyberbeach.net
Ladies Who Do (1963)
85m; U.S.
Director: C.M. Pennington-Richards
Cast: Peggy Mount, Robert Morley and Harry H. Corbett
Synopsis (IMDB): The “Ladies Who Do” are office cleaners. One of them discovers some hot stock tips and they make a fortune. They then make good use of it to save their old neighbourhoods from the wicked developer.
Ladybird, Ladybird (1994)
101m; U.K.
Director: Ken Loach
Cast: Crissy Rock, Vladimir Vega and Sandie Lavelle
Synopsis (IMDB): This Ken Loach docu-drama relates the story of a British womanUs fight with Social Services over the care of her children. Maggie has a history of bouncing from one abusive relationship to another. She has four children, of four different fathers, who came to the attention of Social Services when they were injured in a fire. Subsequently, Maggie was found to be an “unfit mother” and her children were removed from her care. She finally meets the man of her dreams, a Paraguayan expatriate, and they start a family together. Unfortunately, Social Services seems unwilling to accept that her life has changed and rends them from their new children. She and Jorge together, and separately, fight Social Services, Immigration, and other government bureaucrats in a desperate battle to make their family whole again
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 