On Labor Day 1934, hundreds of thousands of Southern cotton mill workers walked off the job in what would become the largest single-industry strike in the history of the United States. But until the making of this film, the General Textile Strike and its violent suppression—seven strikers were killed—were largely unknown. Filmmakers George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock spent nearly six years tracking down primary source materials and surviving strikers in the South not only to reconstruct the historic event but also to examine its inconceivable disappearance from the collective conscience. Through a combination of rare archival footage and contemporary interviews, their film probes the working conditions that led to the strike, the events of the strike itself, and the violence and intimidation whose lasting legacy could be felt even 60 years later. For many of the interviewees, The Uprising of ‘34 provided their first opportunity to speak about the long-suppressed events—demonstrating once again the power of documentary film to recover the collective history so vital to our democracy.  ST