A highly choreographed review of the Industrial Age as we know it today – an intense and playful roller coaster ride that demands the viewer confronts how “work works.” Culled entirely from archival footage, the film unfolds in the filmmakers’ trademark, and humorously critical, cinematic voices.
Man-pulled rickshaw, which have served Kolkata for over eight decades face virtual extinction as a result of legislation introduced by the State Government in 1981. This would rob over 100,000 people of a living. The film analyzes the critical situation, and on the basis of concrete facts and figures, questions whether such a step would be fruitful at all. The image of a man pulling a man is a depressing and a negative one - but not more negative than that of the image of a man going without food.
You've never heard of Jonathan Hoefler or Tobias Frere-Jones but you've seen their work. They run the most successful and respected type design studio in the world, making fonts used by the Wall Street Journal to the President of the United States.
Documents the conflicts and tensions that arise between highland migrants and Mosetenes, members of an indigenous community in the Bolivian Amazon. It focuses particularly on a system of debt peonage known locally as ‘habilito’. This system is used throughout the Bolivian lowlands, and much of the rest of the Amazon basin, to secure labor in remote areas.
Created in the Victorian era to widen the mouth of the River Tees for shipping, South Gare is a man-made peninsula extending four kilometres into the cold North Sea. Today, the industry it was built for has gone, but the Gare remains as a haven for all sorts of unexpected communities - kite-surfers, photographers, bird-watchers, scuba-divers and the people who simply appreciate its strange, lonely beauty.
An explanation of social security, survivors’ insurance and other benefit systems, encouraging workers to file for their social security cards.
Take a deep dive into the booming, scantily-clad barista coffee shop scene in Seattle where sex sells - your morning coffee. But behind the intrigue of lingerie and java lurks a darker side, where female "bikini baristas" struggle with the troublesome and inappropriate behavior of their male clientele. At what cost are merchants willing to foster a culture of sexual harassment and use sex to push profit?
CARNY is an intimate, gritty and poetic adventure following the lives of 'carnys' - traveling fairground workers whose experiences are outside the normalcy of most North Americans.
Kieslowski’s later film Dworzec (Station, 1980) portrays the atmosphere at Central Station in Warsaw after the rush hour.
A documentary that invites the viewer to immerse themselves in a intimate and thoughtful walk through Poblenou Cemetery in Barcelona, better know as "El Santet", to see what is happening at its surrounding areas and, especially, inside: work, buildings, people watching over those who are no longer here, cemetery workers... A trip through a space that is closer than we think.
MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris.
Three women share their experience of navigating the app-world in the metro city. The sharings reveal gendered battles as platform workers and the tiresome reality of gig-workers' identities against the absent bosses, masked behind their apps. Filmed in the streets of New Delhi, the protagonists share about their door-to-door gigs, the surveillance at their workplaces and the absence of accountability in the urban landscape.
In suburban Buenos Aires, thirty unemployed ceramics workers walk into their idle factory, roll out sleeping mats and refuse to leave. All they want is to re-start the silent machines. But this simple act - the take - has the power to turn the globalization debate on its head. Armed only with slingshots and an abiding faith in shop-floor democracy, the workers face off against the bosses, bankers and a whole system that sees their beloved factories as nothing more than scrap metal for sale.
Railroad of Hope consists of interviews and footage collected over three days by Ning Ying of migrant agricultural workers traveling from Sichuan in China's interior, to the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China's northwest frontier.[1] Through informal interviews aboard the cramped rail cars, Ning Ying explores the hopes and dreams of the workers, many of whom have never left their homes before.
Unconventional portrayal of mining in the Swedish Lapland ore fields, a powerful image and sound symphony that can be experienced both as a documentary and symbolic work.
Not everyone sleeps at night in Zagreb. An exploration of various night-time jobs.
In a village in Belgium, the earth opens up, letting out the voice of a man, a stone worker. His fingers sculpt and carve, but the flashes of stone stop at the walls of a small workshop attached to his house. Each blow of his chisel rips a piece of history, of conscience, of struggle into oblivion. Meanwhile, not so far from his workshop, the quarry, without age, without memory, advances, devours the surrounding houses, the streets, the town, the roots...
Stylized with dramatic interiors and a distorted frame rate, this early documentary miniature from Szulkin depicts six sequences of solitary, repetitious labor.
This film documents the coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastovers refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk. Director Barbara Kopple puts the strike into perspective by giving us some background on the historical plight of the miners and some history of the UMWA. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with New York Women in Film & Television in 2004.