9th Annual Labor Film Festival
Past * Present * Future
Strike (85 min. 1925) USSR
By Sergei Eisenstein
Strike is a powerful film on a locomotive factory strike in 1903 in Russia. A worker is blamed for a theft by the management and hangs himself. The conditions that workers faced under Czarist Russia are extremely oppressive, and this leads to workers organizing to fight back. The struggle for
workers rights was met with brutal repression, and these conditions led to the Russian revolution. Eisenstein, who was the foremost film maker in Russia at that time, shows the role of not only the owner of the factory but also the police, the government and the military who are brought in to destroy the strike by firing on the strikers. Today, as workers face harsher and harsher conditions and the government being used to support the bosses, while the times are different, the growing repressions against labor and working people has continuity. (from San Francisco 2013 LaborFest)
Shift Change: Putting Democracy to Work (70 min. 2012) USA
By Mark Dwarkin & Melissa Young
Shift Change tells the little known stories of employee-owned businesses that compete successfully in today's economy while providing secure, dignified jobs in democratic workplaces. It documents workers running their own factories or businesses from Mondragon in the Basque Country in Spain to the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives in San Francisco that are independent worker owned and managed cooperative bakeries. This movement is challenging the corporate ideology that only billionaires and their executives can run a business. See the trailer @
http://shiftchange.bullfrogcommunities.com/
Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? (76 min. 2013) USA
By Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher
Heist is a feature documentary which investigates the roots of the current economic crisis, and the ongoing assault on working people in the United States. It tells the hidden story of the systemic, multifaceted corporate attack on the middle class that, starting in the 1970s, transformed America’s well-regulated economy into a battlefield littered with foreclosed homes, runaway jobs, and broken dreams. The American economy has been eviscerated due to four decades of deregulation, the outsourcing of forty-million manufacturing jobs, and self-serving tax policies that have created a new class of robber barons. It is merely the biggest heist in American history.. See the trailer @ http://www.heist-themovie.com/
Brazil (132 min 1985) United Kingdom
By Terry Gilliam
Pitting the imagination of the common man against the oppressive Storm Troopers of the Ministry of Information, Brazil is an anti-totalitarianism cautionary tale equal to the works of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley & Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. See the trailer @ www.YouTube.com Brazil the movie
