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Category Archives: Documentary

Shattering the Silences: The Case for Minority Faculty

26 Apr

86m

Shattering the Silences: The Case for Minority Faculty offers everyone in higher education an unprecedented opportunity to see American campuses through the eyes of minority faculty.

Across America campus diversity is under attack; affirmative action programs are banned, ethnic studies departments defunded, multicultural scholarship impugned. Even so, faculty of color remain less than 9.2% of all full professors and minority student enrollment is dropping for the first time in 30 years.

Shattering the Silences cuts through the rhetoric of the current Culture Wars by telling the stories of eight pioneering scholars – African American, Latino, Native American and Asian American. As we watch them teach, mentor and conduct research, we realize in concrete terms how a diverse faculty enriches and expands traditional disciplines and contributes to a more inclusive campus environment.

available from California NewsReel

 
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Posted by on April 26, 2012 in Documentary, Education

 

SPTU/Irish Ferries Dispute (2005)

26 Apr

25m; Ireland

Director: Give It A Go Productions

Synopsis: How solidarity worked in the 2005 Irish Ferries dispute.

 
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Posted by on April 26, 2012 in Collective Bargaining, Documentary

 

Struggles in Steel: The Fight for Equal Opportunity (1996)

26 Apr

58m; U.S.

Director: Tony Buba, Raymond Henderson

Cast: Raymond Henderson, Dennis C. Dickerson and Katrina Heiss

Synopsis (IMDB): This documentary tells the forgotten story of the African-American struggle for equality in the U.S. steel industry (based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). In a series of interviews intermixed with archival footage and stills, we learn how these workers faced and overcame discrimination that came from white workers, the big steel companies, and even from their own unions.

 
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Posted by on April 26, 2012 in Blacks, Documentary, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Organizing

 

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Sacco and Vanzetti (2007)

26 Apr

80m; U.S.

Director: Peter Miller

Synopsis (IMDB): The story of two Italian immigrant radicals who were executed in 1927 offers insights into present-day issues of civil liberties and the rights of immigrants.

 
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Posted by on April 26, 2012 in Communism/Socialism, Documentary, Immigrants/Immigration, Labor History, Legal System

 

Salesman (1969)

26 Apr

91m; U.S.

Director: David and Albert Maysles

Synopsis: This landmark documentary follows four Boston bible salesmen as they struggle to make a living in the cutthroat world of door-to-door sales. The film follows the salesmen as they wheedle, connive and cajole their way into homes and wallets. As the pressure of the job bears down, the film reveals the dark underside of the American Dream.

 
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Posted by on April 26, 2012 in Documentary, Self-Employed/Freelance, Working Class

 

San Francisco State: On Strike (1969)

26 Apr

20m; U.S.

 
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Posted by on April 26, 2012 in Documentary, Education, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts

 

Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags (2009)

26 Apr

75m; U.S.

Director: Marc Levin

Synopsis: Schmatta documents the current post-crash economy. We hear from freshly unemployed workers who put on a brave face, preserve their humour and try to make sense of the changing landscape. The shops stemming off Seventh Avenue that once hummed with sewing machines are being converted for upscale renters. If this gargantuan industry can be reduced to such a fraction, what does it mean for the rest of us?

 
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Posted by on April 26, 2012 in Documentary, Unemployment-Wages

 

Land of Destiny (2010)

20 Apr

78m; U.S.

Director: Brett Story

Synopsis: A hard-working petrochemical town is rocked by revelations that its workers suffer an epidemic of cancers. But even more terrifying is the looming spectre of deindustrialization and joblessness. In the rich fabric of the city’s landscape – rows of boarded storefronts, the bright sprawl of petrochemical plants and the swollen rooms of hospital wards and crowded bars – one finds a microcosm of the 21st century. Tattooed men serving fries, basement musicians, boilermakers and volunteer firemen, heartbroken widows and an optimistic mayor – the lives of a diverse medley of characters intersect to reveal the dramas and contradictions of an industrial town out of sync with a post-industrial world. As the dystopian architecture of the petrochemical plants, squatted like crushed space stations just meters away from homes and schoolyards, give way to the spaces that make this city a community, we begin to see what it is that everyone seems so afraid to lose. A portrait of a working-class city in paralysis and a mediation on work and place in the modern economy, Land of Destiny offers a poignant and universal story about work, community, and struggle in an era of globalization.

Contact: http://www.bunburyfilms.com/films/trailer/doc/lod.html

 
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Posted by on April 20, 2012 in Documentary, Global Economy, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Unemployment-Wages, Working Class

 

Land, Rain, and Fire (2006)

20 Apr

28m; Mexico

Director: Tami Gold

What began as a teacher’s strike in May of 2006 against privatization and for better wages and more resources for students, erupted into a massive movement for profound social change in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Government repression brought even greater popular resistance, which ultimately brought the state government to a standstill.

 
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Posted by on April 20, 2012 in Documentary, Education, Organizing, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts

 

The Last Campaign (2005)

20 Apr

107m; U.S.

Director: Wayne Ewing

Synopsis: “The Last Campaign” – a sequel to Ewing’s legendary first film in 1972, “If Elected…” – covers the 2004 campaign of Justice Warren McGraw for the re-election to the West Virginia Supreme Court, dubbed the ‘nastiest’ judicial race, if not the most expensive in the nation. Scenes from “If Elected…” -which covered Warren McGraw’s 1972 race for the West Virginia State Senate and was originally broadcast by Bill Moyers in 1973 – are interspersed with the story of McGraw’s 2004 Supreme Court race to create a unique, cinema verite portrait of American politics over a 32 year span. One man’s struggle to resist corporate interference in the electoral process is the continuing theme. In 2004, the US Chamber of Commerce is suspected, of funneling millions of dollars from multi-national corporations into West Virginia in the primary and general election in a successful effort to defeat Justice Warren McGraw as a part of what Forbes Magazine described as a “secret war” against judges in America. The Chamber’s shadowy efforts were joined in the general election by a group calling itself “For the Sake of the Kids” which spent millions, supplied from a coal company executive to wage a smear campaign against McGraw alleging that he let a sexual predator loose to work in a school. That same coal company executive has a pending 50 million dollar judgment against his company on appeal before the West Virginia State Supreme Court.

Contact: http://www.thelastcampaign.com/

 
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Posted by on April 20, 2012 in Documentary, Legal System, Politics

 

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