Directed by Travis Wilkerson • Documentary • 2003 • 53 minutes

AN INJURY TO ONE provides a corrective-and absolutely compelling-glimpse of a particularly volatile moment in early 20th century American labor history: the rise and fall of Butte, Montana. Specifically, it chronicles the mysterious ...

Documentary • 1975 • 15 minutes

UE/Wells follows an organizing drive by the United Electrical Workers Union at the Wells Foundry in Chicago. The multi-ethnic work force of Polish, Arab, Jewish, Hispanic and African American men and women unite together despite the company's efforts to use race a...

Directed by Judy Hoffman • Documentary • 1975 • 20 minutes

Striking workers in one Chicago unemployment compensation office talk about working conditions that led to a walkout in July, 1975. Workers and claimants suggest possible solutions to the problems of understaffing and compulsory overtime...

Documentary • 1980 • 33 minutes

Taylor Chain I tells the gritty realities of a seven-week strike at a small Indiana chain factory during 1973-74. Volatile union meetings and tension-filled interactions on the picket line provide an inside view of the tensions and conflicts inherent to labor nego...

Documentary • 1983 • 30 minutes

In 1981-2, the Kartemquin filmmakers returned to the Taylor Chain plant to show labor and management working together against the odds, trying to save the plant from becoming the latest victim of anti-union legislation and the globalization of cheap, exploitable l...

Directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer • Documentary • 1979 • 89 minutes

Founded in Chicago in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) took to organizing unskilled workers into one big union and changed the course of American history. This compelling documentary of the IWW (or “The...

Directed by Marcelo Gomes • Documentary • 2019 • 86 minutes

The small village of Toritama is a microcosm of relentless capitalism. Each year, more than 20-million pairs of jeans are produced in make-shift factories. The locals work non-stop hours, proud to be the masters of their own time. Durin...

Directed by Florian Opitz • Documentary • 2017 • 96 minutes

SYSTEM ERROR takes us from to the roots of the expectation of unlimited growth, particularly in the post-World War II years, to the financial crash of 2008 and beyond. Does the subsequent decade of simultaneous inequality, austerity, an...

Directed by Mark Dworkin, Melissa Young • Documentary • 2023 • 31 minutes

Cincinnati is an historic city, just across the Ohio River from Kentucky in the heart of the American Midwest. In the years when people were fleeing slavery in the South, the city became a way station on the underground ra...

Directed by Daniel Hoesl • Documentary • With Klaus Schwab, Christine Lagarde • 2021 • 99 minutes

Looking to decipher the fractured world of ours was the driving force to make this film. We‘ve been following the everyday life in Davos for over a year. The challenges of our society are shown thro...

Directed by Gordon Quinn, Jerry Blumenthal • Documentary • 1983 • 56 minutes

In 1864, George Pullman began selling his famous railroad sleeping cars which helped him build a vast industrial empire that was supposed to last forever. In 1981, however, Pullman workers found themselves in the midst ...

Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2023 • 215 minutes

The town of Zhili, about 95 miles from Shanghai, is a center for the children’s garment industry. Workers in their teens and early twenties come from surrounding provinces to live in sparse, trash-strewn concrete dorms in the same building...

Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2024 • 226 minutes

YOUTH (HARD TIMES) is the second installment in Chinese director Wang Bing’s monumental series chronicling the lives of migrant garment workers — some as young as 15 — in the Zhili district of Huzhou City. Wang immerses himself in the live...

Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2024 • 160 minutes

Shi Wei, a young migrant garment worker, flops back onto a pile of soft fabric bundles on his workshop’s floor, cellphone in hand. “Shit, I’m exhausted,” he says to the boss who’s trying to get him to sew more clothing before the Lunar New...

Directed by Thomas Stuber • Drama • With Franz Rogowski, Sandra Huller • 2018 • 125 minutes

When the reclusive Christian (Franz Rogowski, TRANSIT) takes a job working the night shift at a big box store, his new manager, Bruno from the Beverage Department (Peter Kurth, BABYLON BERLIN), teaches hi...

Directed by The Medvedkin Group • Documentary • 1969 • 37 minutes

In 1967, Chris Marker and Mario Marret (under the aegis of SLON) produced A BIENTOT J'ESPERE , which documented a strike and factory occupation-the first in France since 1936-by textile workers at the Rhodiaceta textile plant in B...

Directed by Olivier Azam, Daniel Mermet • Documentary • With Howard Zinn • 2016 • 100 minutes

"As long as rabbits don't have historians, history will be written by the hunters."

With the tremendous success of his book, A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn radically changed the w...

Directed by Hee-young Ko • Documentary • 2016 • 52 minutes

In Jeju Province, located off the southern coast of Korea, are the women of the sea who hold breath of life. Typhoons and the barren volcanic soil of the islands left the people enduring years of poor harvest and famine. For survival, wo...

Directed by Vicky Funari & Julia Query • Documentary • With Julia Query, Siobhan Brooks, Kristina, Ellen, Star, Joyce Wallace • 2000 • 70 minutes

Winner of the Audience Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Live Nude Girls Unite! is "a partisan tale from the inside" (Boston Pho...

Directed by Claude Berri • Drama • With Renaud, Gérard Depardieu, Miou-Miou • 1993 • 160 minutes

Winner of France’s prestigious César Awards for Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design, this epic film is based on the novel by Émile Zola.

During the Second Napoleonic Empire (the mid-19th cen...

Directed by Nick Bentgen and Lisa Kjerulff • Documentary • 2013 • 105 minutes

Set against the backdrop of a town's annual snowmobile race, NORTHERN LIGHT explores the working class experience in a series of captivating personal stories of recession-era America. The lives of three families change...

Directed by Harry Watt & Basil Charles Wright • Documentary • 1936 • 23 minutes

A cornerstone of British documentary, Harry Watt and Basil Wright's NIGHT MAIL, with music by Benjamin Britten and verse by W.H. Auden, stands as a beacon for John Grierson's original purpose for documentary - to mak...

Directed by Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher • Documentary • 1980 • 55 minutes

A dramatic portrait of immigrant life in the U.S. as seen through the eyes of the sweatshop workers who made up the Jewish anarchist movement. Between 1900 and WWI they built trade unions, organized schools, sponsored ...

Directed by Rehad Desai • Documentary • 2014 • 86 minutes

In August 2012, mine workers in one of South Africa's biggest platinum mines began a wildcat strike for better wages. Six days into the strike, the police used live ammunition to brutally suppress it, killing 34 and injuring many more. Th...