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 cooperatives.
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 cooperatives.
1977-09-24
0
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 conditions while they sought work.
OBAIDA, a short film by Matthew Cassel, explores a Palestinian child’s experience of Israeli military arrest. Each year, some 700 Palestinian children undergo military detention in a system where ill-treatment is widespread and institutionalized. For these young detainees, few rights are guaranteed, even on paper. After release, the experience of detention continues to shape and mark former child prisoners’ path forward.
This short film brings light to the reality of transsexuality during childhood and aims to emphasize the importance of the role of grandparents.
When the killer of an adolescent labor activist is acquitted, journalist Shahbaz Bhatti sees glaring loopholes in the verdict, and begins a quest for justice. But each lead he follows contradicts the one before, and the twisted story reveals the ugly truth of child labor in 1990s Pakistan.
This deeply human documentary examines the subject of environmental destruction, highlighting the impoverished migrant workers who are chopping down the Amazon rainforest to create charcoal for pig iron production used primarily in the automobile industry. The film examines the children and elders and their daily lives and work as they burn timber in igloo-looking huts, their bodies charred gray for $2 a day, struggling to survive.
"The Voice of Innocence" is a documentary that shows how, starting in 1959, the Cuban Revolution put into practice a comprehensive and universal policy of safeguarding the rights of the child, even under the multiple difficulties resulting from the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States more than six decades ago. Cuba is one of the main signatories of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed on 20 November 1989, when the country had already made extraordinary progress in protecting the rights of the child, in comparison to developed countries, such as the United States, which as of today hasn't yet ratified the Convention.
Strong and independent Eliza works as the Polish teacher in a village school and begins an affair with local delinquent Stach. They have a child out of wedlock. When Stach is sent on forced labourer in Germany, Eliza and her child set off on an epic journey to be reunited with her lover.
An experimental documentary exploring the turn-of-century lynching of union organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana.
A feature-length documentary film by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. After 43 horrific days working round the clock under constant bombardment in the emergency rooms of Gaza’s Al Shifa and Al Ahli hospitals, British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, emerged to find himself as a face of Palestinian resistance.
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 knowledge and to promote respectful, safe maternity practices all over the globe. From the backs of their technicolor school buses, these pioneers rescued American midwifery from extinction, changed the way a generation approached pregnancy, and filmed nearly everything they did. With unprecedented access to the midwives' archival video collection, as well as modern day footage of life at the alternative intentional community where they live, this documentary shows childbirth the way most people have never seen it--unadorned, unabashed, and awe-inspiring.
The lowest paid teachers in the nation are in the middle of a statewide walkout in Oklahoma. From start to finish, Walkout follows the teachers as they get organized and demand raises from their state legislature. From crowded classrooms to a packed state capitol, Walkout offers an in-depth, personal look at the latest strike at the heart of a nationwide movement for education funding.
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.
Brought by poverty, Petang and Cereno are driven into the realm of child labor to live by the clock. Film Weekly follows their journey as they step back to breathe and to be children once again.
An entertaining video filmed over two years. Kids, teachers, heads, parents, ex-pupils tell the story of this unique experimental school. “Kids don’t have to go to lessons at Summerhill and can wear and do mostly what they want. How does that work??!!
A blend of drama and documentary, this film follows several people caught up in the turmoil of the modern world. The drama centres on a woman who has burned out and who holds up her own despair – and her attempts to rebuild her life – as a mirror to the rest of us. With a blend of gravity and humour, Sylvie Groulx's film shows the absurdity of a society dedicated to the cult of speed at all costs.
In this era, robotic peo- ple making humanized machine, is it a hopeless tragedy, or the beginning of a brave new world?
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 were well-respected by their community. Yet, harsh working conditions prevented them from being promoted to other railway jobs until finally, in 1955, porter Lee Williams took his fight to the union.
This short documentary is a tribute to the unknown father. Emerging filmmaker Danic Champoux poses the question "How many men still have to uproot themselves and leave their families to get work?" as he sets out to search for his own father. He wonders about these men who are labourers, itinerants, and mostly nameless, but who are all exemplary providers. But at what cost? This film was produced as part of the Libres Courts collection of first-time documentary shorts.
This is a film which challenges our notions of child labor. It peeks into a world where the concept of childhood as we know it has no meaning, where children support their parents, and where work is just another part of growing up. This is Dhaka, Bangladesh. Following several children over a period of six years, A KIND OF CHILDHOOD is an attempt to focus on the realities of child labor, with real children, their struggles and dreams.
In Footsteps, Fiona Tan creates connections between personal stories and the world around us. The footage shows children at play and Dutch windmills, but above all people engaged in heavy physical labour in the countryside and in factories. In a fascinating juxtaposition, she combines these images with excerpts from letters she received from her father just after she moved to the Netherlands in the late 1980s. Through his education in Indonesia, Tan’s father knew a lot about the Netherlands without ever having visited the country. In the letters, he meanders seamlessly between personal news and world events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.