Nous irons jusqu'au bout (les Kaolins de Plemet)
1973 · 37m · Documentary
Chronicle of the 9-week strike by the kaolin workers of Plémet. The film emphasizes the particular nature of such a strike in a rural commune and in a sector of the old Breton proletariat: that of subsoil mining, almost entirely liquidated after the closure of the Hennebont forges.
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Unity SPD – KPD
1946 · ★ 6
Documentary about the merging of the Communist Party of Germany and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in the Soviet occupation zone, a merger that would lead to the creation of the Socialist Unity Party that would rule the soon-to-be-created East Germany until 1989.
More info →Atlas
1931
The concept of machine-made knit was known as early as the 1850s, but it was only during the 1920s that the quality of the material had improved. When the plant known as "Atlas" was introduced in 1931, the shop windows drew a lot of attention, and Aho & Soldan was ordered to make a promotional film. In this well-paced film, we see the jersey production step by step.
More info →Under den gamle Fane
1932 · ★ 9
Dramatization of the time around the first Danish Social Democrats and the Battle of Fælleden. A social blockbuster produced for AOF.
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Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory
1895 · ★ 6.7
Working men and women leave through the main gate of the Lumière factory in Lyon, France. Filmed on 22 March 1895, it is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made, although Louis Le Prince's 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene pre-dated it by seven years. Three separate versions of this film exist, which differ from one another in numerous ways. The first version features a carriage drawn by one horse, while in the second version the carriage is drawn by two horses, and there is no carriage at all in the third version. The clothing style is also different between the three versions, demonstrating the different seasons in which each was filmed. This film was made in the 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and at a speed of 16 frames per second. At that rate, the 17 meters of film length provided a duration of 46 seconds, holding a total of 800 frames.
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Earth
1931
A main agenda of the prewar farmer's movement was struggle against landowners. Prokino also considered this as their prime concern. The main title sequence and the latter part of the film have unfortunately been lost. While we cannot see its entire structure, we can still get a glimpse of it from this surviving short.
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Megacities
1998 · ★ 6.6
Megacities is a documentary about the slums of five different metropolitan cities.
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Railway Station
1980 · ★ 4.7
Warsaw's Central Railway Station. 'Someone has fallen asleep, someone's waiting for somebody else. Maybe they'll come, maybe they won't. The film is about people looking for something.
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Wildcat
1977
During the 1975 wildcat strike in Appalachia, tens of thousands of coal miners walk off the job to defend their right to strike, as cameras capture the struggle from inside the movement.
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24 City
2008 · ★ 7
As a decades-old state-run aeronautics munitions factory in downtown Chengdu, China is being torn down for the construction of the titular luxury apartment complex, director Jia Zhangke interviews various people affiliated with it about their experiences.
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Let's Rise Up
2022
On 9 July 2021, the 422 workers at the GKN factory in Campi Bisenzio near Florence received their dismissal, by email. They immediately met in front of the factory, scared away the management's bodyguards and have been holding an open-ended meeting at the factory ever since. In June of 2022, they talk about how they are rooted in the territory, why 30,000 people demonstrated with them. They explain why they put their struggle under the slogan "Insorgiamo!" ("Let's rise up!"), the slogan of the italian partisans who liberated Florence in 1944. But they also talk about their collaboration with climate activists and what they would like to produce. But as things stand today, it is not the workers who are responsible for the ecological damage caused by production: "Nobody asked me what I would like to produce when they hired me. They hired me and that was it."
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Charlie Marx and the Chocolate Factory
2009
Charlie Marx and the Chocolate Factory started as an investigation of the link between politics and chocolate, at the Karl Marx Confectionary Factory in Kiev, Ukraine. Since access to the factory was denied, the project had to be re-considered, re-invented or re-enacted. Mostly made of archival footage and re-enacted performances based on the company's website, the film merges what was left of the initial idea with what has been collected and realized instead. It borrows from the genres of video art, 'Man on the street' interview, direct address, corporate film, essay, and music video, without legitimately belonging to any of them. The film unravels as a reflection on its own failure, and yet keeps on investigating what has always been at stake: the shift from public to private property (and from analog to digital technology), dialectics of permanence and change, language as a mirror of ideology, and post-Soviet oligarchy culture.
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Song of Armorica
2016 · ★ 6
A poetic drama, spoken in the Breton language and set in a Breton fishing community, telling of the impossible love between a waifish fisherman and a highborn lady-of-the-manor.
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