28m
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Synopsis (SIU): The Seafarers showcases the Seafarers International Union’s service to its members and explains the benefits and job security of being part of a union. The film was directed by Stanley Kubrick, marking his first exploration into color cinematography. Kubrick was commissioned by the SIU to film the documentary. Kubrick provided his own sound and camera equipment and marshaled the Seafarers Log editorial staff as his crew.
114m
Director: Donald Brittain
Synopsis (NFB): Harold Chamberlain Banks, a convicted felon and union strongarm, was recruited in 1949 to break up the communist-controlled unions that were blocking the country’s shipping industry and to replace them with a Canadian chapter of the Seafarers’ International Union (SIU). This gripping docudrama, based on eyewitness accounts and courtroom testimony, recalls thirteen turbulent years of violence and corruption during which the careers of 6 000 seamen were destroyed by the power of one man, Banks. Canada’s Sweetheart recounts the events leading up to 1962, when a small group summoned the courage to stand up to Banks and his organization. This challenge resulted in the government-appointed Norris Commission hearings–a landmark in Canadian labor history.
Wesbite: http://www.onf-nfb.gc.ca/eng/collection/film/?id=16132
49m
Director: John Grierson
Synopsis (WorldCat): A key film of the British documentary movement; for the first time in the British cinema workers at their jobs (the men of the herring fleets) were the central subject of a film. The emphasis is on poetic images of motion; the influences are Flaherty and editing techniques suggested by Soviet films.
11m; Burma and Thailand
Synopsis: A special report of the International Transport Workers’ Federation about Burma’s migrant fishers. Undocumented Burmese fishermen suffer brutal treatment at the hands of their Thai bosses. Seafarer unions are working to expose these crimes and help Burmese workers in the fishing industry win basic rights and worker protections.
See it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deCo_ZBSk-U
77m
Director: Ken Loach
Broadcast Date: February 19,1969
Network: BBC1
Synopsis (BFI): ‘The Big Flame’ was writer Jim Allen‘s second Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964-70), and his first with director Kenneth Loach. After ‘The Lump’ (tx. 1/2/1967), about the exploitation of casual labour in the building trade, Allen used his Marxist credentials to depict striking Liverpool dockers enacting a Communist-style system of workers’ control.
The play was filmed in Loach‘s accustomed drama-documentary format, honed on previous Wednesday Plays like ‘Up the Junction’ (tx. 3/11/1965) and ‘Cathy Come Home’ (tx. 16/11/1966). Real dockers appear, and the actors speak not well-rehearsed lines but in the disjointed, often incoherent, manner of authentic speech. It is captured on murky 16mm film, giving the picture the same quality as contemporaneous newsreel footage. Only the occasional voiceovers diverge from the apparent objectivity of this fly-on-the-wall aesthetic.
Allen‘s script is remarkably prophetic; it foreshadowed Britain’s massive industrial unrest of 1973-4 and its conclusion prefigures the explosive clash of worker and state in the miners’ strike of 1984. Although they would work together frequently, Loach considered ‘The Big Flame’ to be Allen‘s “definitive script”.
The mix of radical politics and the documentary approach proved incendiary. Anticipating controversy, the BBC postponed the play’s transmission twice. When finally screened, it was labelled a “Marxist play presented as sermon” by the Daily Mail and it rekindled the press’s vociferous interest in the ongoing debate about television drama-documentary.
Mary Whitehouse, secretary of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, complained that the play was “a blueprint for the communist takeover of the docks” and wrote to both Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Conservative leader Ted Heath to urge a review of the BBC‘s charter. The play’s subject would become all too real for Heath, who, as the next Prime Minister, presided over a period of bitter industrial conflict.
113m; Spain
Director: Fernando Leon de Aranoa
Cast: Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar and José Ángel Egido
Synopsis (IMDB): 2001: men without jobs, in the port city of Vigo. Six men worked in a shipyard, now shuttered. They pass the time at La Naval, a bar opened by one of them after the yard closed. They face their futures in makeshift ways: Rico has his bar and a sharp 15-year-old daughter, Reina has become a watchman and a moralizer, Lino fills out job applications, Amador drinks heavily and talks of his wife’s return; José is married to Ana, who works at a cannery and tires of being the breadwinner amidst José’s emasculated moodiness; Santa, the group’s conscience and troublemaker, occasionally fantasizes about Australia. In truth, all are joined like Siamese twins, adrift.
Contact: distributor: Lions Gate Films Alyssa Chinn Ph: 310 314-9597 Fax: 310 396-6041 achinn@lgecorp.com
Watch on YouTube
94m; U.S.
Director: J. Walter Ruben
Cast: Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy and Una Merkel
Synopsis: Fisherman Dutch marries cannery worker Hattie. After he is kicked out of his union and fired from his job he leaves Hattie who steals money for him and goes to jail. He gets a new job, foils a plot to dynamite the ship, and promises to wait for Hattie.
Trailer
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