Everything Here Holds Its Inverse
2024 · 5m
Set in a Burkina Faso organic cotton weaving cooperative, a cacophonous cotton-spinning apparatus eats, digests, and takes a breath. Threads become the organs of a whirling, burping, guzzling machine animated by hands, looms, vats, cogs, and feet. Where does the machine end and the body begin? The weaving cooperative promises equitable remuneration for workers in an industry beholden to its colonial predecessor: today, Burkinabè cotton farmers live in permanent debt to cotton companies financed by European capital. By focusing on the repetitive labor unfolding within a cooperative that claims to serve its workers, Everything Here Holds Its Inverse examines the tension between empowerment and evolving oppressions. Can the ties that bind and define also set free?
More Like This
Une certaine histoire du cinéma expérimental français
2019
Founded in the second half of the 1990s, the experimental film association L'Etna witnessed the transition from film to digital cinema. Its premises, located in the heart of Paris, were unable to withstand gentrification.
More info →
Land of Upright People
2023
October 2014. Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, is the scene of an unarmed uprising that ousts the dictator in power since 1987 and later staves off an attempted coup. In 2015, the country votes freely for the first time in its history, yet real change remains allusive, especially regarding ongoing economic exploitation by foreign companies. In one year of struggle and resistance, the film follows the daily life of four Burkinabes: a musician and leader of the revolution, a local political candidate, a miner engaged in the labor movement, and an impoverished mother, all sharing hopes that the elections will change the country’s path.
More info →
Una necesidad popular
1972 · ★ 5
The Cooperative Movement in Barquisimeto (CECOSESOLA) emerged as an alternative to the outrages against the people and their inability to afford a decent burial for their relatives.
More info →
The Toast of New York
1937 · ★ 6.2
After the American Civil War, Jim Fisk, a former peddler and cotton smuggler, arrives in New York, along with his partners Nick and Luke, where he struggles to make his way through the treacherous world of Wall Street's financial markets.
More info →
Moolaadé
2004 · ★ 7.2
When a woman shelters a group of girls from suffering female genital mutilation, she starts a conflict that tears her village apart.
More info →
Baby Doll
1956 · ★ 7
Archie Lee Meighan is a failing cotton gin owner who is married to Baby Doll, a 19-year old childlike beauty whose father arranged the marriage for financial reasons. As Archie awaits the arrival of Baby Doll's 20th birthday, the day that they are supposed to consummate their marriage, he faces interference from business rival Silva Vacarro, who plots to seduce Baby Doll away from Meighan.
More info →
La historia es nuestra: Pascual, lucha obrera y cooperativismo
2019
History is Ours narrates the struggle of the workers of the Refrescos Pascual soft-drink company against its owner, Rafael Jiménez, the official trade unionism of the CTM and the labor authorities of the governments of José López Portillo and Miguel de la Madrid, between 1982 and 1985. It documents the workers' difficult struggle to take over the company, when justice, which had been elusive, finally proved them right, and opened the possibility that these brave, tenacious workers would become collective owners of the company. Today, these soft-drink fighters resist a system that hits Mexican companies in favor of the monopolistic transnationals. The film is an account of one of the most brilliant episodes of the contemporary Mexican labor movement, an example of unity and class consciousness, embodied by men and women who make their struggle a tribute to comrades Concepción Jacobo García and Alvaro Hernández García, tragically fallen at the beginning of this historic event.
More info →
The Twenty Dollar Miracle
1967
The American woman is the best dressed woman in the world. This is due to Yankee ingeniuty, which makes a fashionable, well-made dress to sell for twenty dollars or less.
More info →
Ouaga Girls
2017 · ★ 6.8
A group of young women from Ouagadougou study at a girl school to become auto mechanics. The classmates become their port of safety, joy and sisterhood, all while they are going through the life changing transition into becoming adults in a country boiling with political changes. In a country with youth unemployment at 52 percent, jobs are a hot issue. The young girls at a mechanics school in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou are right in the middle of a crucial point in life when their dreams, hopes and courage are confronted with opinions, fears and society’s expectations of what a woman should be. Using interesting narrative solutions, Theresa Traore Dahlberg depicts their last school years and at the same time succeeds in showing the country’s violent past and present. This is a feature-film debut and coming-of-age film with much warmth, laughs, heartbreak and depth.
More info →Woven Songs of the Amazon
2007 · ★ 7
The Shipibo-Konibo people of Peruvian Amazon decorate their pottery, jewelry, textiles, and body art with complex geometric patterns called kené. These patterns also have corresponding songs, called icaros, which are integral to the Shipibo way of life. This documentary explores these unique art forms, and one Shipibo family's efforts to safeguard the tradition.
More info →
The Cabin in the Cotton
1932 · ★ 6.3
Sharecropper's son Marvin tries to help his community overcome poverty and ignorance.
More info →