Film Category: Chair-Making, Ship-Breaking, Pole-Dancing, Coal-Mining, Thread-Cutting, Cart-Pushing, Cane-Cutting, Chain-Forging: Films on Work & Labor

The Sixth Section
Alex Rivera

A weekly Saturday night gathering of fellow immigrants in chilly upstate New York turns into an exercise in serious philanthropy and the chance to make a significant difference in their hometown in Mexico.

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Chairmaker
Rick DiClemente

Spend time with Dewey Thompson as he transforms a tree into a rocking chair while sharing stories about a lifetime spent in Appalachia.

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Coal Miner: Frank Jackson
Ben Zickafoose

From the Appalshop archive, a rare trip down a 1970s Virginia coal mine with an expressive, engaging miner to tell us about union organizing, prejudice, and the coal-mining way of life.

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Hammer and Flame
Vaughan Pilikian

In a surreal, unending cycle, workers at the shipbreaking yards of Gujarat in India take monstrous ships apart, bolt by bolt, using only the simplest of tools.

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Taylor Chain
Jerry Blumenthal, Gordon Quinn

In stirring 16mm, this portrait of a seven-week strike at a small steel chain factory offers remarkable access to picket line confrontations, tumultuous union meetings, and conflict-ridden negotiations.

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The Target Shoots First
Christopher Wilcha

Before becoming a successful filmmaker, a punk musician turned marketing assistant took his camera to work at Columbia House Records and for two years documented his unexpected rise to management, with results that are both funny and painful.

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The Wobblies
Stewart Bird, Deborah Shaffer

Members of the Industrial Workers of the World, now in their eighties and nineties, reminisce about their union’s heyday—the textile strikes, free-speech battles, life in the lumber camps—in this meticulously researched history of the Wobblies.

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Live Nude Girls Unite!
Vicky Funari, Julia Query

Workers at the Lusty Lady, a notorious peepshow theater in San Francisco, set out to form the only strippers’ union in the United States.

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Man Push Cart
Ramin Bahrani

A much-lauded independent fiction film about a former Pakistani rock star, now selling coffee and bagels on the streets of Manhattan and struggling to reclaim his life.

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Morristown: In the Air and Sun
Anne Lewis

Morristown, Tennessee, and Juarez, Mexico, are being drawn closer together by the global economy, and the way their inhabitants live and work (or don’t) is a testament to how the dislocating effects of so-called free-trade agreements have cemented into place a permanent, migratory underclass within our borders, and within Mexico’s.

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