At War
★ 7 · 2018 · 105m · Drama
After promising 1100 employees that they would protect their jobs, the managers of a factory decide to suddenly close up shop. Laurent takes the lead in a fight against this decision.
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2005 · ★ 6.4
The Middle Eastern oil industry is the backdrop of this tense drama, which weaves together numerous story lines. Bennett Holiday is an American lawyer in charge of facilitating a dubious merger of oil companies, while Bryan Woodman, a Switzerland-based energy analyst, experiences both personal tragedy and opportunity during a visit with Arabian royalty. Meanwhile, veteran CIA agent Bob Barnes uncovers an assassination plot with unsettling origins.
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On This Earth
1957 · ★ 7
Ichiro’s family used to be a large landowner, but now he is living in poverty with his mother. His mother works hard to get her son through school. Under such circumstances, Ichiro meets Wakako, the daughter of a wealthy man, and they fall in love with each other, but they are opposed by those around them because of their different social status.
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Chance of a Lifetime
1950 · ★ 6.6
The workers in a small plough factory take over the firm, but when a large order falls through, the old management come back to help out.
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2009
The struggle of a small group of blacksmiths trapped between keeping a long going strike with claims for better fees and the necessity of getting back to work when there's no money left for basic necessities.
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Matewan
1987 · ★ 7.4
Filmed in the coal country of West Virginia, "Matewan" celebrates labor organizing in the context of a 1920s work stoppage. Union organizer, Joe Kenehan, a scab named "Few Clothes" Johnson and a sympathetic mayor and police chief heroically fight the power represented by a coal company and Matewan's vested interests so that justice and workers' rights need not take a back seat to squalid working conditions, exploitation and the bottom line.
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Lady Caliph
1970 · ★ 5.5
La Califfa's husband was killed during the strikes so she takes the side of the strikers. Her conflict with the plant owner Doverdo gradually turns into a love relationship.
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Blue Baby
2026
A specialist nurse is given responsibility for a baby boy with a serious heart condition in the middle of nurses’ strike. She is left balancing between her own family, the baby boy and her loyalty for nurses’ cause.
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1990 · ★ 10
A historical drama set in 1889, Chandler's Mill examines the plight of workers, and particularly child workers, in the New Brunswick wool industry. The story revolves around the efforts of one young teenage girl to better the lives of her friend and other workers, on the eve of a public hearing of the Canadian Royal Commission on Capital and Labour. Through the use of historical re-enactment, Chandler's Mill explores the issues of child labour, worker's rights and union organizing in 19th-century Canada.
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Salt of the Earth
1954 · ★ 7
At New Mexico's Empire Zinc mine, Mexican-American workers protest the unsafe work conditions and unequal wages compared to their Anglo counterparts. Ramon Quintero helps organize the strike, but he is shown to be a hypocrite by treating his pregnant wife, Esperanza, with a similar unfairness. When an injunction stops the men from protesting, however, the gender roles are reversed, and women find themselves on the picket lines while the men stay at home.
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Silkwood
1983 · ★ 6.9
Like most of the people in her town, Karen Silkwood works at the local nuclear plant producing highly radioactive plutonium. Exposed one day to a lethal dose of radiation, Karen faces the blank walls of corporate indifference and denial. As her illness increases, her protest grows louder and she becomes an obvious danger to the powers that be.
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A Matter of Sex
1984 · ★ 7.3
Dramatization of the true story of the so-called Willmar Eight, a group of Minnesota bank workers who braved freezing conditions whilst picketing their branch in a struggle for union rights.
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Torn Boots
1933 · ★ 5.5
Working with children led Barskaya to create superb direct sound and an inspired style of shooting. Don’t look for conventional cinematic syntax here. The film is chaotic in the way that Soviet films still knew how to be, and Langlois couldn’t help but be seduced by its rebellious spirit, its anarchy and love of children, comparable to Vigo’s Zero de conduite. As well as being a film made with and for children, it offers a complex take on Western society. Pre-Nazi Germany is not named as such but is carefully reconstructed, possibly under advice from Karl Radek, and children offer a playful reflection of class struggle – doubly excluded, as proletarians and as minors. “They play in the same way that they live”, one intertitle says. The interaction between their comical games and the yet more ludicrous ones played by adults is developed on several levels.
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