Film Category: Chair-Making, Ship-Breaking, Pole-Dancing, Coal-Mining, Thread-Cutting, Cart-Pushing, Cane-Cutting, Chain-Forging: Films on Work & Labor
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.
MORE ›Spend time with Dewey Thompson as he transforms a tree into a rocking chair while sharing stories about a lifetime spent in Appalachia.
MORE ›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.
MORE ›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.
MORE ›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.
MORE ›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.
MORE ›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.
MORE ›Workers at the Lusty Lady, a notorious peepshow theater in San Francisco, set out to form the only strippers’ union in the United States.
MORE ›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.
MORE ›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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