5:06; U.S.
Director: March of Time newsreel
Synopsis: Newsreel footage about Pearl Berghoff, the owner of the Berghoff Agency which was one of the premier strike-breaking companies through the 1930s. The newsreel both gives an overview of Berghoff, and looks specifically at his company’s involvement in strikes in Georgia in 1934.
U.S.
Director: Ken Ross & Louis V. Galdieri
Synopsis: 1913 Massacre follows singer/songwriter Arlo Guthrie to the town of Calumet, a once-thriving mining town on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula still haunted by the tragic events that inspired Woody Guthrie’s ballad, ’1913 Massacre.’
On December 24, 1913, the striking copper miners of Calumet were gathered with their wives and children for a holiday party at the Italian Hall. After the festivities had begun, someone — to this day, no one knows who — yelled Fire!
Despite efforts to keep the Hall under control, panic took hold of the crowd. The miners, their wives and children made a mad rush for the stairs. In the ensuing chaos, seventy-four people were crushed and suffocated to death on the stairway. Fifty-nine of the dead were children. There was no fire.
In the version of events that found its way into Woody Guthrie’s song, the “copper-boss thug-men” had plotted to yell Fire! and were holding the door of Italian Hall shut, so that the miners and their families could not escape.
The town itself is still divided over exactly what happened. And no one can explain why they tore down the Italian Hall in 1984.
1913 Massacre captures the last living witnesses of the 1913 tragedy and reconstructs Calumet’s past from individual memories, family legends and songs, tracing the legacy of the tragedy to the present day, when the town –out of work, out of money, out of luck — still struggles to come to terms with this painful episode from its past.
Contact: http://1913massacre.com/about/
Trailer
85m; Colombia/Canada
Director: Carmen Garcia & Germán Gutiérrez
Synopsis: Colombia is the trade union murder capital of the world. Since 2002, more than 470 workers’ leaders have been brutally killed, usually by paramilitaries hired by private companies intent on crushing the unions. Among these unscrupulous corporate brands is the poster boy for American business: Coca-Cola. Talk to Martin Gil: His brother Isidro was killed at point-blank range while working at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa, because he was part of a union bargaining unit. Like most violent crimes committed against Colombian union leaders, Gil’s murder went unpunished. However, U.S. lawyers Daniel Kovalik and Terry Collingsworth, as well as activist Ray Rogers, stepped in and launched an ambitious crusade against the behemoth Coca-Cola. In an incredible three-year saga, filmmakers German Gutierrez and Carmen Garcia follow these heroes in a legal game of cat and mouse. From Bogota to New York, Guatemala to Atlanta, Washington to Canada, The Coca-Cola Case maintains the suspense of a hard-fought struggle. The lawyers filed several cases at the U.S. federal court against Cola-Cola for murder, abduction and torture committed in Colombia and Guatemala. Thanks to activist Ray Rogers, they also attacked the brand image of the Atlanta-based giant, with the devastating Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, causing dozens of U.S. colleges and universities to remove Coke products from campuses.
Contact: http://www.thecoca-colacase.org/
87m; U.S.
Director: George Stoney, Judith Helfand & Susanne Rostock
Synopsis: THE UPRISING OF ’34 tells the story of the General Strike of 1934, a massive but little-known strike by hundreds of thousands of Southern cotton mill workers during the Great Depression. The mill workers’ defiant stance – and the remarkable grassroots organizing that led up to it – challenged a system of mill owner control that had shaped life in cotton mill communities for decades.
Contact: First Run Icarus Films (http://www.frif.com/cat97/t-z/the_upri.html) / http://www.pbs.org/pov/uprisingof34/
85m;
Director: Bradley Cox
Synopsis: In 1999, Cambodian garment workers demanding decent wages and working conditions found their leader in Chea Vichea. As president of Cambodia’s free trade union, he stood with them despite beatings and death threats. Until a sunny morning in 2004. As Vichea read the paper at a sidewalk newsstand, three bullets silenced him forever. Under intense international pressure, the police arrested two men and extracted a confession. They were sentenced to 20 years each. But did they have anything to do with the crime? What seems at first to be justice done starts to look like a frame-up. And the implications reach far beyond the police station and the courtroom: to the headquarters of the ruling party and to the garment trade that is Cambodia’s economic lifeblood. Director Bradley Cox shot Who Killed Chea Vichea? over five years, covering events as they happened and tracking down witnesses in a country where knowing too much can cost you your life. Who Killed Chea Vichea? is a highly charged murder mystery, a political thriller, and a documentary like no other.
Contact: http://www.whokilledcheavichea.com/
2:46m; U.S.
Director: Michael Moore
Synopsis: Comic vignette from Michael Moore’s TV show The Awful Truth.
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