Filmmaker: Ting-Ging YU
Taiwan | 2015 | Fiction | 18 minutes
Yen is an albino. She struggled through study and became a teacher. Hao-hao wrote to Yen and told her that he finally got a job. Ah-chih suffers from physical handicaps and creates great paintings. The director compares those who suffer from physical handicaps but being hard-working like angels sent by God.
Filmmaker: Angelo Defanti
Brazil | 2014 | Documentary | 20 minutes
“But the thing is, if a guy is a writer and want to write about his reality, this reality will be imbued with the fact that he is writer”. André is Sérgio’s son.
2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival; http://www.bilff.org
Filmmakers: Elisabeth Marjanovic ́ Cronvall and Marta Dauliute
Sweden, 2015, Documentary, 15 minutes
Recipe for fascism: Half a generation unemployed, doctors forced to choose whom to treat, social security disappearing, the public on discount.
We ask our friends in Greece to make a list of their images of the euro crisis. It becomes a warning list for the North.
2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival; http://www.bilff.org
Filmmaker: Lee Salter
United Kingdon | 2014 | Documentary | 10 minutes
A film documenting the struggles of precarious workers to receive full pay from the hospitality industry in Brighton. This documents one such struggle, led by Solidarity Federation against a cafe that was not paying.
2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival
Filmmakers: Beto Novaes and Claisson Vidal
Brazil | 2015 | Documentary | 30 minutes
The documentary portrays life trajectories of women farmers participating actively in agroecological movements in Brazil. They are protagonists of important social changes in the Brazilian countryside. Moreover, these women organise the movements themselves, autonomously, as social and political leaders that are questioning stereotypes of the social imaginary.
2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival; http://www.bilff.org
Michael Honey’s film with Errol Webber
In 1960, Reverend James Lawson helped to launch the Nashville sit-in campaign which successfully desegregated the Woolworth’s lunch counter, and inspired a new generation of student civil rights activities throughout the South. After Nashville he pastored the largest African American Methodist Church in Memphis and continued to work closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham and on other civil rights campaigns, teaching workshops in nonviolence. At each stage of his life, Lawson has supported campaigns for labor rights as a dimension of human rights.
Next to King himself, Reverend Lawson remains one of the most important social justice leaders of our time. This project set out to examine the legacy of Reverend Lawson, particularly his nonviolent approach to labor and civil rights, and to help share his story. The Love & Solidarity project did just that when it premiered a film by the same name that chronicles Lawson’s life and work as a force for positive change. In addition the Love & Solidarity project, led by Dr. Michael Honey, has launched the Love & Solidarity website to help share this story of how ordinary people can use nonviolence to make a more peaceful and just world.
This is a project of the Fetzer Advisory Council on Labor, Trades, and Crafts.
Michael Honey, Fred and Dorothy Haley Professor of Humanities
1900 Commerce St. Tacoma, WA 98402
253-692-4454
michaelkhoney@gmail.com
mhoney@uw.edu
University of Washington, Tacoma
http://faculty.washington.edu/mhoney/
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.
21 minutes
This film produced by The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) gives a taste of the post WWII politics that led to the Taft-Hartley Act that restricts the ability of workers to join unions.
Episode 4 (60 min.)
By 1934 challenges to the New Deal came from both sides of the political spectrum. In California Socialist Upton Sinclair ran for Governor promising to turn idle land and factories into self-governing cooperatives. Sinclair’s campaign ended in defeat, but one year later President Roosevelt’s signing of the Social Security Act signaled America’s emergence as a modern welfare state.
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 