The Hole Story
Striking images, rare archival footage and interviews underpin this analysis of Canadian mining companies' profits, impact on the environment and on workers' health.
The Gig Is Up
From delivery riders and rideshare drivers to the invisible workers training artificial intelligence, millions of people around the world are caught in a radical transformation of work. Through intimate, deeply personal stories spanning multiple continents, The Gig Is Up reveals the human cost of platform capitalism. Promising freedom and flexibility, companies like Uber, Amazon and Deliveroo have created a system in which algorithms determine who works, what they earn and when they can be fired. As workers confront precarious livelihoods, corporate power and an increasingly uncertain future, they also find ways to resist. A sweeping yet intimate portrait of the people behind the digital economy, the film explores a growing global struggle over the future of work.
Love, Women and Flowers
Women workers stand up to the toxic flower industry in Colombia.
I've Got to Live...
The sawmill in a northern Swedish village close down. Nils becomes unemployed. In order to cope with needs of his family, he is forced to travel south. His wife Karin and the children will stay in the village until further notice. Nils starts working at a factory. In addition to the job, he has been promised a good residence so that the family can move to him.
The Fields of Immokalee
For decades, migrant workers have worked the fields of Immokalee, harvesting tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, oranges and other produce that is then shipped across the United States of America. Many of the workers are undocumented, and attempting to keep their jobs even as federal migration crackdowns hover over the town. The Fields of Immokalee film follows the daily lives of tomato workers, from the 5:00am trips to the parking lot in hopes of finding day labor, to work sessions in the scorching mid-day heat, to child detention centers for migrant youth that have been separated from their families. Via these vignettes, the film offers insight into the most volatile political issue of our time.
Blow It to Bits
A mix of Rock and Roll and Blues are the secret for successful rebellion. When I took my camera to the middle of France where the GM&S factory was threatened by a permanent shut down, I felt like something extraordinary was about to take place. And it did. The lyrics were written by workers who have had enough! The tune was composed by people not afraid to go against even the rules of revolt! The volume was loud enough to attract the media. Their working-class concert spread across France like wild fire. I sat out of sight, camera in hand, filming like catching fish in a barrel.
Triangle: Remembering the Fire
On March 25, 1911, a catastrophic fire broke out at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City. Trapped inside the upper floors of a ten-story building, 146 workers - mostly young immigrant women and teenage girls - were burned alive or forced to jump to their deaths to escape an inferno that consumed the factory in just 18 minutes. It was the worst disaster at a workplace in New York State until 9/11. The tragedy changed the course of history, paving the way for government to represent working people, not just business, for the first time, and helped an emerging American middle class to live the American Dream.
Die Mutigen 56 - Deutschlands längster Streik
Emma Freese is desperate when her husband Alfred falls ill at the Howaldtswerke in Kiel. How is the family supposed to get by without their wages? The war has scarred this generation, but now things are supposed to be looking up. The workers want their fair share and are fighting for an income that also gives them room to live. In October 1956, 34,000 metalworkers in the shipyards and factories of Schleswig-Holstein walk off the job to fight for justice and their dignity. This strike is still regarded as the toughest and longest in Germany. Employers and politicians stand in the strikers' way.
A Permanent Part-Timer in Distress
The director, twenty-three-year-old Iwabuchi Hiroki, is a permanent part-timer who on weekdays does menial work at a factory for 1,250 yen an hour, and on weekends takes on casual temporary work in Tokyo, a city he is fascinated with. He joins a demonstration demanding rights for permanent part-timers, and is featured on TV as "a poor, unhappy temporary worker." Despite having made his own choice to live as a permanent part-timer, he says that "the days feel like drowning in shallow water." But during the diary-like documentation of his life, something changes...
Thuramukham
The Harbour shows how two brothers end up on opposing sides of this system. One becomes the leader of an employer’s gang of thugs, while the other becomes an activist. All the while, the women in their family go hungry and the community is ravaged by violence and alcoholism.
The Hidden Shift
This film noir-inspired work began as a three-act play. Here it becomes juxtaposed with a documentary style "making of" film. It is both a film and a film about the making of that film. This cinematic device is further complicated by the casting of museum staff as the film's actors. What emerges is not just a behind-the-scenes look into the creative process but an intimate portrait of daily museum life. Alongside cast rehearsals and set building, we see staff using the copy machine, greeting visitors, and cracking jokes at a morning meeting. The result is a twisting metanarrative that dissolves the boundaries between art and labor, performance and production. Through its structure and story. The Hidden Shift invites viewers to grapple with complex questions surrounding capitalism, the meaning of work, and the precarity of the so-called 'creative class.
Un homme de Parole
"They Didn't Starve Us Out": Industrial Cape Breton in the 1920s
For 200 years, coal mining had been a way of life in Cape Breton. By 1920 things were looking up: miners were unionized and paid decent wages. Then the British Empire Steel Corporation arrived and bought every single steel and coal company in Nova Scotia. BESCO cut wages by a third, setting off a bitter labour dispute. The miners settled in for a long strike. Finally, in 1925, the military ended the unrest with brute force. But the miners, in one sense, had won. They broke up the monopoly and provided an example to workers across the country.
3.87
During 2004 alone, 1400 people in Italy died at their workplace, 3.87 per day. Andrea is one of them.
Becoming Ourselves: How Immigrant Women Transformed Their World
A social justice organization based in Oakland-Asian Immigrant Women Advocates-focused on building the collective leadership of limited-English speaking immigrants, and empowered women and youth to become powerful agents of social change.
Conversations with Turiansky
Biographical portrait of the labor movement and left wing movement in Uruguay, "Conversations with Turiansky" combines two stories. The first portrays the son of immigrants, the engineer passionate about the mystery of electricity, the man in love, the movie buff. The other places the protagonist in his time: union struggles, the advance of authoritarianism, prison and the challenges of the present. In both are present the lucidity, commitment, discreet tenderness and humor of Wladimir Turiansky.
La Brigada – A Mural for the Unidad Popular in Dresden
During the 16th Workers' Festival in Dresden in 1976, a student group of Chilean emigrants paints a mural symbolically depicting the activity of the Unidad Popular during Salvador Allende's reign. Festival guests comment on this work. Music by Chilean music group Jaspampa, formed in Leipzig in 1972.
Beyond Ratings
Three women share their experience of navigating the app-world in the metro city. The sharings reveal gendered battles as platform workers and the tiresome reality of gig-workers' identities against the absent bosses, masked behind their apps. Filmed in the streets of New Delhi, the protagonists share about their door-to-door gigs, the surveillance at their workplaces and the absence of accountability in the urban landscape.
Uyire (ഉയിരേ)
A complex web of emotions which unfolds the grounding difference between love & predilection. An underlying, but prominent current of class difference between Indrajit & Zoya, brings clarity to the waters that they're in.
Farewell Ferris Wheel
Farewell Ferris Wheel explores how the U.S. Carnival industry fights to keep itself alive by legally employing Mexican migrant workers with the controversial H-2B guestworker visa.