Film Category: Thematic

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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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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The Workers
Heather Courtney

Immigrant day laborers in Austin perform some of the city’s most critical jobs but find themselves at the center of a town battle over the location of their depot, which nobody wants in their backyard.

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The Uprising of ’34
George Stoney, Judith Helfand

Through rare archival footage and participant interviews, this groundbreaking film recovers the long-suppressed history of the 1934 General Textile Strike, when hundreds of thousands of Southern cotton mill workers walked off the job.

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