Based off the John Steinbeck novel: an activist gets caught up in the labor movement for farm workers in California during the 1930s.
Director: James Franco
Category Archives: Working Class
Industria Argentina (2011) (Argentine Industry)
Directed by: Ricardo Díaz Iacoponi
Country: Argentina.
Running Time: 96 minutes.
Starring: Aymará Rovera, Carlos Portaluppi, Cutuli.
http://www.indargentina-film.com.ar/indexar.html
Trailer: http://indargentina-film.com.ar/trailer.html
At Arlumar, a spare parts factory, workers resist to lose their only means of earning their living. Juan, as well as many other employees, has not collected his salaries for months. His pregnant wife and his debts make him foresee a very dark future ahead. Little by little, taking control of their desperation, Juan and his coworkers begin to organize themselves to keep running the company that has been abandoned by its owners. In that way, they assume the rebuilding of a company that has no employers, which proves to be a heavy burden to carry.
Evelyn Williams
Directed by Anne Lewis, USA, Appalshop,1995 (28 minutes)
https://store.appalshop.org/shop/appalshop-films/evelyn-williams/
Evelyn Williams is a portrait of a woman who is many things: a coal miner’s daughter and wife; a domestic worker and mother of nine; a college student in her 50s and community organizer; an Appalachian African American. Above all, she is a woman whose awareness of class and race oppression has led her to a lifetime of activism. Now in her 80s, she is battling to save her land in eastern Kentucky from destruction by a large oil and gas firm.
With humor, eloquence, and at times anger, Evelyn tells her story. Her family came to eastern Kentucky in 1922 when she was six years old. She remembers the Klan burning a cross on the mountain and describes the sense of powerlessness that followed a lynching for which the murderers were never arrested. She married a coal miner and later moved to West Virginia where her daughters were able to attend college.While her husband worked in the mines and helped organize the union, she cleaned the homes of coal company bosses. When the mines mechanized and laid off workers, the family moved to Brooklyn, N.Y. where Evelyn studied at the New School for Social Research and became active in efforts to improve her community. Her commitment to fight for justice and equality was deepened when her son was killed in Vietnam and the U.S. military misinformed and mistreated the family. Following retirement in the early 70′s, Evelyn and her husband returned to a piece of family land in Kentucky. Most recently, she has been a leader of a grassroots effort by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth to end oil and gas company use of the broadform deed to drill on surface owners’ land without their permission. In explaining her determination to preserve her land, she recalls her grandfather, an ex-slave, who said, “Take care of the land. Take care of the land. As long as you have land, you have a belonging.” The program portrays a fascinating and dynamic personality whose keen sense of communal and family history influences her determination. Through her story, Evelyn makes important connections between civil rights, women’s rights, and environmental concerns.
Buzzard (2014)
97 min | Comedy, Drama | 6 March 2015 (USA)
Director/writer: Joel Potrykus
Stars: Joshua Burge, Joel Potrykus, Teri Ann Nelson
Marty is a caustic, small-time con artist drifting from one scam to the next. When his latest ruse goes awry, mounting paranoia forces him from his lousy small town temp job to the desolate streets of Detroit with nothing more than a pocket full of bogus checks, a dangerously altered Nintendo® Power Glove, and a bad temper. Albert Camus meets Freddy Krueger in BUZZARD, a hellish and hilarious riff on the struggles of the American working class.
NYTimes: Review: In ‘Buzzard,’ an Angry, Unkempt Antihero
An unsparing portrait of an office temp and scam artist near the bottom of the economic food chain.
NYTimes: Joel Potrykus’s Film ‘Buzzard’ Is Inspired by Dead-End Jobs
The writer and director’s deadpan comedies have followed a man-child on the skids.
Tales (2014) “Ghesse-ha” (original title)
88 min | 30 July 2015 (Argentina)
A series of seven vignettes about different people dealing with their every day problems in modern day Iran, that are loosely related to each other.
Director: Rakhshan Bani-Etemad
Writers: Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Farid Mostafavi
Stars: Habib Rezaei, Mohammad Reza Forutan, Mehraveh Sharifinia
Sunder Nagri (Beautiful City) (2003)
Director: Rahul Roy
English (subtitled), 78 min, 2003, India
http://magiclanternmovies.in/film/city-beautiful
Sunder Nagri (Beautiful City) is a small working class colony on the margins of India’s capital city, Delhi. Most families residing here come from a community of weavers. The last ten years have seen a gradual disintegration of the handloom tradition of this community under the globalisation regime. The families have to cope with change as well as reinvent themselves to eke out a living.
Radha and Bal Krishan are at a critical point in their relationship. Bal Krishan is underemployed and constantly cheated. They are in disagreement about Radha going out to work. However, through all their ups and downs they retain the ability to laugh.Shakuntla and Hira Lal hardly communicate. They live under one roof with their children but are locked in their own sense of personal tragedies.
Producer: Rahul Roy
Creative Crew
Camera: Rahul Roy
Editing: Reena Mohan
Sound: Asheesh Pandya
Rahul is a noted documentary filmmaker who has widely worked on the issues of labor and gender in India. His film The City Beautiful masterfully depicts the life of two families in an Indian working-class colony, focussing on the decline of traditional handloom industry because of globalization. His recent work The Factory (2015) is about the struggle of Maruti automobile workers in New Delhi. For more than two years, 147 workers from the Maruti Suzuki plant were kept behind bars without bail or any charge sheet being presented to the defence counsel. Rahul has followed their crisis and struggle from 2013 to 2015. Read more about the film in this Indian Express piece.
Director contact info: rahulroy63@gmail.com
Precious Memories (2015)
Precious Memories has one act, 84 minutes long. I wrote the script but not the songs, which are by Sarah Ogan Gunning (“I Hate the Capitalist System”); her brother Jim Garland (“I Don’t Want Your Millions Mister,” the real point of which is that we do); and her half-sister Aunt Molly Jackson (“I Am A Union Woman”), plus two traditional ballads and excerpts from three gospel songs.
THE PLAY: Part memory play, part eulogy, part concert, this one-woman show written by legendary folk singer and community organizer Si Kahn traces the life of Sarah Ogan Gunning, an unsung hero of American folk/labor music history. The play finds Sarah alone in her Detroit basement apartment on the evening after her sister Aunt Molly Jackson’s funeral, as she attempts to set the record straight and say goodbye. Although Sarah Ogan Gunning is a name almost unknown to us today, her powerful songs about the coal mining region of Eastern Kentucky in the 1930’s were an influence on Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and other famous folk singers of her day.
Si Kahn <sikahn36@gmail.com
7 Chinese Brothers (2015)
76 min | Comedy | 28 August 2015 (USA)
Director/writer: Bob Byington
Stars: Jason Schwartzman, Stephen Root, Olympia Dukakis
Larry (Jason Schwartzman) is content with his dog Arrow and booze, barely tolerating anything or anyone else. His marginally successful relationships include his grandmother, who keeps him afloat financially, and his best friend Norwood, who provides him with pharmaceuticals. But a chance encounter at a Jiffy Lube gives Larry a beguiling new boss and the impetus to head in another direction for a while. This movie showcases all that may be needed to help a person get unstuck in life: love (or an unrequited crush), friendship (or someone your family likes better than you) and family (or in this case a grandmother who will support you whenever you get fired from a job).
This droll film, written and directed by Bob Byington, drifts aimlessly but appealingly with Mr. Schwartzman as its lost hero.
Labour in a Single Shot
http://www.labour-in-a-single-shot.net
Starting in 2011 artist, curator, and author Antje Ehmann and filmmaker, video artist and author Harun Farocki initiated video production workshops in 15 cities around the world in which participants were to engage with the subject of ‘labour’: paid and unpaid, material and immaterial, traditional or new. The videos could not be longer than two minutes and they had to be taken in a single shot. The camera could be static, panning or travelling but cuts were not allowed. This concept references the Brother Lumière’s famous film Workers Leaving the Factory which was filmed in one continuous take from a fixed camera position.
The result of these workshops, which were organised together with local branches of the Goethe-Institut, are 400 films which show people engaged in all kinds of work, each film taking a different stance, literally and figuratively, towards its subject while also recording the diverse mental attitudes and bodily relation people have to their work.
Facing the challenge of filming something that might be essentially repetitive, continuous and boring, the films also foreground the work of the camera operator and his or her aesthetic decisions. In the multitude and diversity the films form a visual compendium and an archive of labour and cinema in the 21st century that is never boring or repetitive but enhances and simultaneously questions our perception and understanding of work.
All the films can be watched on a dedicated website, at random, or sorted by city, colour or type of work. A selection of 90 films was shown as an installation at the House of World Culture in Berlin from 27 February to 6 April 2015 with an accompanying conference. This exhibition also presented the project ‘Workers Leaving the Factory in 15 Cities’ (2011 – 2014), consisting of contemporary remakes of the famous film by the Lumière Brothers which were shot in 15 cities all over the world. Also included in the exhibition was the installation ‘Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades’ (2006), which showed scenes of workers leaving the factory throughout the history of cinema, from the Lumière Brothers (1895) to Lars van Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000).
‘Labour in a Single Shot’ is a co-production of the Harun Farocki Filmproduktion with the Goethe-Institut.
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 