China (Director: Jiu-liang Wang) — Yi-Jie, an 11-year-old girl, works alongside her parents in a recycling facility while dreaming of attending school. Kun, the facility’s ambitious foreman, dreams of a better life. Through the eyes and hands of those who handle its refuse, comes an examination of global consumption and culture. International Premiere. THE NEW CLIMATE
Category Archives: Documentary
Machines (2016)
India, Germany, Finland (Director: Rahul Jain) — This intimate, observant portrayal of the rhythm of life and work in a gigantic textile factory in Gujarat, India, moves through the corridors and bowels of the enormously disorienting structure—taking the viewer on a journey of dehumanizing physical labor and intense hardship.
Daunting descent to the underworld of a textile factory in Gujarat, in North-western India, where the cheap clothes for the first world are made. This factory represents many more from Western India, where the scenary and the conditions are like the ones we see here. Claustrophobic, hermetic, unhealthy, dark spaces, with the air saturated of toxic smoke emanated from dye chemicals. Tied to looms, sleepy teenagers, youths and mature men work twelve hours a day for starvation wages: many of them go into debt in order to pay the train ticket to travel from rural areas to the urban factories. The brutal working conditions dehumanize the workers, to the point of turning them into appendixes of machines. Landless peasants join the files of workers without rights nor holydays. Few well selected interviews to workers convey what happens here: employers oppression without any constraint from the State, lack of trade-union reply due to the killing of their leaders, no viable alternative to survive out of the factory.
Relevance: With an excellent cinematography (it gained the Price of the best documentary photography in Sundance), the film transfers a feeling of anguish without loosing artistic dignity. We roam labyrinthic corridors and stagnant rooms, and we absorb the rhythm of production through the monotonous noises from the machines. This great debut of Rahul Jain give voice and faces to some of the more sorely afflicted slaves in the twenty-first century.
Note courtesy Docs and the World
Dolores (2016)
U.S.A. (Director: Peter Bratt) — Dolores Huerta bucks 1950s gender conventions by co-founding the country’s first farmworkers’ union. Wrestling with raising 11 children, gender bias, union defeat and victory, and nearly dying after a San Francisco Police beating, Dolores emerges with a vision that connects her newfound feminism with racial and class justice. World Premiere (Sundance)
COMPANY TOWN (2016)
A new documentary about high tech, political hustle, and the future of cities.
Directors: Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman <secrets@igc.org>
“Company Town” Trailer:
“Riveting…This high minded film lets the personal stories it has uncovered speak the truth to us in a way that “disrupts the disrupters…the best kind of story-telling.”
— Steven Hill, Huffington Post
“Company Town” is a shot of political energy — a valentine to the weird and wild hurly-burly of the electoral process at the grassroots level, from where true democracy springs.”
— David Talbot, founder of Salon and bestselling author of “Season of the Witch” and “The Devil’s Chessboard”
“I was thrilled by Company Town’s virtuoso storytelling, its compassion, and the message that democracy can actually win the fight (sometimes!) against our corporate overlords.” — Josh Kornbluth, Monologuist & Filmmaker
ReMine, the Latest Working Class Movement (2014)
(ReMine, El Último Movimiento Obrero, Marcos Martinez, DCP, Spain 2014, 102 min., Spanish w/subtitles)
In 2012, as global financial institutions harassed debt-ridden Spain, the government introduced crushing austerity measures, including a 63% reduction in subsidies to the coal industry. In northern Spain, a stronghold of militant trade unions, Asturian miners declared an unlimited strike, occupied mines, blockaded highways, fought police, and organized a mass protest march to Madrid, nearly 300 miles away. Across Spain and internationally, the miners’ traditional methods of struggle and organization won wide sympathy and admiration, culminating in a joyous demonstration of solidarity. Yet the future of Spanish coal mining remains in doubt.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/gxaK_YVwSQQ
MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE (Der Banker) (2013)
a film by Marc Bauder
(Der Banker, Marc Bauder, Austria/Germany 2013, 88 min., DCP, German w/subtitles)
Maybe the real masters of the universe are not politicians, armies or even nations: they are probably investment bankers like Deutsche Bank’s Rainer Voss. From a gleaming steel and glass structure in Frankfurt’s financial district, Voss offers a distinctive perspective on the out-of-control mechanics of modern global finance. He describes a parallel universe of extreme wealth and merciless pressure for profit, an opaque system that disconnects bankers from the outside world.
In “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Jordan Belfort cuts short an explanation of his work, because, he says, we probably couldn’t follow the details. “Master of the Universe” attempts that explanation but offers a sobering antidote to irrational exuberance and a psychological case study in the financier’s mind-set. This indefatigable tell-all documentary from Marc Bauder cedes the floor to Rainer Voss, a German ex-trader who tells us with clarity about how it all works. read full NYT review here
Joy of Man’s Desiring (Que ta joie demeure) (2014)
1h 10min | Documentary, News | 16 January 2015 (USA)
Director: Denis Côté
Writer: Denis Côté
Stars: Olivier Aubin, Ted Pluviose, Hamidou Savadogo |
An open-ended exploration of the energies and rituals of various workplaces. From one worker to another and one machine to the next; hands, faces, breaks, toil: what kind of absurdist, abstract dialogue can be started between human beings and their need to work? What is the value of the time we spend multiplying and repeating the same motions that ultimately lead to a rest – a state of repose whose quality defies definition.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/jIaWeSRqNAg
Demain (Tomorrow)
website
Directed by Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent
Many things have been tried to resolve the ecological and economic crises. They haven’t really worked. According to Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohammed Yunnus, the strongest driving force in human beings is their desire and their imagination. He believes that today we must make films and tell stories that spark the desire to build another world. This is what Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent decided to do by lining up known solutions in all spheres side-by-side to show what our society could look like tomorrow…
In France, a Film Taps Into a Desire for Change (NYT, May 2016)
Canefield Songs: Holehole Bushi
26.46m; see the film here: https://youtu.be/umFlb9OhwkM
In this new film, Professor of Anthropology Christine Yano explains, “If we want to know something of what some of these womenʻs lives were like…we could do no better than to listen to their own words, as expressed through song.” The women that Professor Yano is referring to are Japanese immigrants who worked in Hawaii’s sugarcane fields in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through their canefield songs, or holehole bushi, these women sang about their joys and sorrows of trying to start life in a new world. Hosted and narrated by ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro, the film tells the story of music teacher Harry Urata, and his efforts to record, preserve and perpetuate these musical oral histories.
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