1980
52 min
dir. Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Looking back to the momentous events of Belgium’s general strike in 1960, the film focuses on the efforts of Edmond G. and colleagues at the Cockerill steel plant in Seraing to organise and secretly publish a workers’ newspaper between 1961 and 1969.
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.
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
Director: Katharine Round
Running time: 75min
Country: UK
Year: 2015
Inspired by best-selling book The Spirit Level, Katharine Round’s film highlights the widening gulf between rich and poor. Exploring the reasons behind the ever-increasing wealth gap, its impact, and how inequality might even spell trouble for the rich, The Divide is a timely and prescient piece of globetrotting documentary cinema; both a think piece and a powerful warning.
http://raindancefestival.org/features-2014/traceable/
This documentary examines the fashion industry process, and its conscience, from a designers’ perspective.
This environmental documentary has a powerful ethical story to tell and makes even the most exhausted eye-rollers sit up and listen.
The 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh put faces on the term ‘garment factory workers’. With this as a backdrop, ‘Traceable’ looks at the local communities behind clothing industries that have retained distinctive crafts for generations. ‘Traceability’ is the aim to have a proper trail for every single step in the supply chain. As well as where, it wants consumers to be concerned with how garments are made. Thousands of hands in the process go untraceable because many farmers, seamstresses and printers simply do not have the technology to be contacted by email or phone.
Director Jennifer Sharpe follows Laura Seigel, a young designer fighting to connect the design world with anonymous artisans. Most designers do not have the time or enough commitment to nurture a direct relationship with the people who make their clothes. This documentary is partly anthropological, as Seigel designs with the creators hand-to-hand and negotiates with them on their own turf. Without being patronising or naive, ‘Traceable’ captures equal and harmonious working partnerships.
Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Paul Wagner and co-produced by Steve Zeitlin of CityLore and Erie Canal Museum Curator Daniel Ward, the film tells the story of industrial expansion and decline along the Erie Canal and examines its impact on the lives of workers in steel, grain, textiles and shipping. Wagner’s credits include The Stone Carvers and Windhorse. A meditation on economic cycles and the American Dream. The film surveys the macro-economics of industrial expansion and decline along the Erie Canal, and examines its impact on the lives of workers in steel, grain, textiles and shipping. In the wake of economic collapse, can the people of America’s cities find meaning and worth?
Paul Wagner, Charlottesville, VA: pw@paulwagnerfilms.com
96 min | Documentary | 2 October 2015 (USA)
Director/writer: Jennifer Peedom
A fight on Everest? It seemed incredible. But in 2013 news channels around the world reported an ugly brawl at 21,000ft as European climbers fled a mob of angry Sherpas. In 1953, New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay had reached the summit in a spirit of co-operation and brave optimism. Now climbers and Sherpas were trading insults – even blows. What had happened to the happy, smiling Sherpas and their dedication in getting foreigners to the top of the mountain they hold so sacred? Determined to explore what was going on, the filmmakers set out to make a film of the 2014 Everest climbing season, from the Sherpas’ point of view. Instead, they captured a tragedy that would change Everest forever. At 6.45am on 18th April, 2014, a 14 million ton block of ice crashed down onto the climbing route through the Khumbu Icefall, killing 16 Sherpas. It was the worst tragedy in the history of Everest. The disaster provoked a drastic reappraisal about the role of the Sherpas in the Everest industry. SHERPA, tells the story of how, in the face of fierce opposition, the Sherpas united in grief and anger to reclaim the mountain they call Chomolungma.
‘Sherpa’ Delves Into a Risky Profession The documentary makers, who were at Mount Everest when 16 sherpas died in an ice avalanche in 2014, explore the tensions between these guides and their wealthy clients.
Filmmaker: Angelo Defanti
Brazil | 2015 | Documentary | 20 minutes
Marcelo on a cloudy day in Rio de Janeiro.
2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival
Filmmakers: Marta Dauliute and Elisabeth Marjanovic ́ Cronvall
Sweden/Lithuania | 2013 | Documentary | 60 minutes
“Do you feel cheaper?” We are filming Lithuanian migrant working men in Sweden. They do not want to be on camera, they do not want to participate in creating one more media image for guilt and pity. They film us. We empty a bottle of moonshine, we dance on their porch. They might let us film them tomorrow.
Through sincere and frustrating negotiation to get access to film the migrant workers, Second Class becomes a discussion about class, the value of work and human. While showing the filming process film raises questions about power relations in film industry itself.
2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival
Filmmaker: Jenny Cartwright
Canada/Burkina Faso | 2014 | Documentary | 68 minutes
From his village to the big city, Sylvain is trying to make it in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso, one of the world’s five poorest countries. There, he found a job as a bar manager at Le coin des Amis, a “buvette” owned by Hortense, a policewoman trying to make ends meet. Work is home for Sylvain: he works seven days a week and sleeps in the backroom. He has only one thing in mind: saving up enough money to get his driver’s license. If he succeeds, he could drive a merchandise truck, a job that would allow him to find a wife and start a family. In Burkina Faso, you are not really an adult until you are married. That is why he saves 100% of the 20$ he makes every month. In a year’s time he will have saved up enough cash to start his lessons.
2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival
Filmmaker: Dragoss Ouedraogo
Burkina Faso | 2015 | Documentary | 62 minutes
Since 2009, Burkina Faso knows a situation of “mining boom” after a campaign of geological exploration and an incitement of foreigner investments. But thanks to a favourable mining code and a discriminatory legislation, this “mining boom” looks like a huge operation of looting the resources of the country, enriching the managers of this network and droping the populations loosing their grounds.
The Gold of Faso does not shine for every body and the anger grows.
2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival
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