Movies: Labor

France: 2020s. Piotr, a young Polish immigrant stuck in a string of odd jobs, crosses paths with Stefano, a burly mover. Little did Piotr know, this encounter would soon draw him into the eerie world of nighttime fighting....

World War II created a huge demand for American farm products. But the war also caused vast numbers of farm workers to abandon the fields, either to join the military or to seek work in the cities. The solution would be a unique contract-worker agree...

A bare-knuckled critique of corporate America told through the powerful true story of a toxic CEO who evolves from a profits-over-people, philandering executive to an unorthodox leader, populist messenger, and mentor to American influencers. It’s a s...

Some people will do anything to secure an American visa, as hard as that might be. Some enter lotteries, others beg friends and families to invite them. Others still, just sneak in and hope Mr Trump doesn’t notice they are there. But in this raucous ...

An Indian immigrant awakens inside a confined metal box, with the walls slowly closing in... unless he can do the work assigned to him....

A study, in film animation, of a day in the life of a housewife, described without words, with a minimum of detail but with a perception all the more pertinent because of the simplicity of presentation. The film makes no judgments. It simply states t...

How Finnish immigrants came into contact — and conflict — with industrial America. Three generations of Finnish-Americans recount how they coped with harsh realities by creating their own institutions: churches, temperance halls, socialist halls, and...

Filmed in the Inner Mongolian portion of the Gobi Desert, this film follows a group of oil field workers as they go about their daily routine....

It's a warm spring night, and the bee cowboys of Prince Edward Island begin rounding up their hives....

This extraordinary documentary is an unflinching record of the workers’ struggle during Japan’s economic rebirth in the 1980s, centered on Tokyo’s Sanya “yoseba”—a slum community dating from the 19th century where day laborers lived in terrible condi...

An experimental documentary exploring the turn-of-century lynching of union organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana....

This 1996 documentary takes a nostalgic ride through history to present the experiences of Black sleeping-car porters who worked on Canada's railways from the early 1900s through the 1960s. There was a strong sense of pride among these men and they w...

Through first person narration, Tari reveals personal stories related to her decision to work in Taiwan, her strained family relationships, the risks involved in working abroad and the traps she has fallen into....

Every December to January, almost a hundred squid fishing boats from Ch'ien-chen Fishing Harbor in Kaohsiung will sail from East 120 to West 60 to work at Falkland Islands in the South West Atlantic. The sailing takes 35-40 days and crew members name...

Behind the scenes of a popular deli on New York's Upper East Side, undocumented immigrant workers face sublegal wages, dangerous machinery, and abusive managers. Mild-mannered sandwich maker Mahoma López has never been interested in politics, but in ...

Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and The Farm Midwives captures a spirited group of women who taught themselves how to deliver babies on a 1970s hippie commune. Today as nearly one third of all US babies are born via C-section, they fight to protect their...

The story of the children who work 12-14 hour days in the fields without the protection of child labor laws. These children are not toiling in the fields in some far away land. They are working in America....

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’ tradem...

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 t...

An explanation of social security, survivors’ insurance and other benefit systems, encouraging workers to file for their social security cards....