Contract

Documentary about the nurses' strike in Finland on autumn 2007.

First Daughter and the Black Snake

The “Prophecy of the 7th Fire” says a “black snake” will bring destruction to the earth. For Winona LaDuke, the “black snake” is oil trains and pipelines. When she learns that Canadian-owned Enbridge plans to route a new pipeline through her tribe’s 1855 Treaty land, she and her community spring into action to save the sacred wild rice lakes and preserve their traditional indigenous way of life. Launching an annual spiritual horse ride along the proposed pipeline route, speaking at community meetings and regulatory hearings. Winona testifies that the pipeline route follows one of historical and present-day trauma. The tribe participates in the pipeline permitting process, asserting their treaty rights to protect their natural resources. LaDuke joins with her tribe and others to demand that the pipelines’ impact on tribal people’s resources be considered in the permitting process.

Solidarność: How Solidarity Changed Europe

Gdańsk, Poland, September 1980. Lech Wałęsa and other Lenin shipyard workers found Solidarność (Solidarity), the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. The long and hard battle to bring down communist dictatorship has begun.

Wildcat: The Struggle for Democracy in the New Zealand Timberworkers' Union

Delegates and workers discuss the issues that effect the Timberworkers’ Union, the reasons for the formation of the Combined Council of Timber Workers Delegates (CCD) and their industrial action.

Harlan County U.S.A.

This film documents the coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastovers refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk. Director Barbara Kopple puts the strike into perspective by giving us some background on the historical plight of the miners and some history of the UMWA. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with New York Women in Film & Television in 2004.

Union

Up against one of the most powerful companies on the planet, a group of Amazon workers embark on an unprecedented campaign to unionize their warehouse in Staten Island, New York.

The Main Stream

Humorist Roy Blount Jr. takes viewers on a journey down the Mississippi River, showcasing everything from areas with spectacularly beautiful scenery to ugly and dangerously polluted stretches bordered by industrial development.

Thatcher vs The Miners: The Battle for Britain

On the 5th of March 1985, a crowd gathered in a South Yorkshire pit village to watch a sight none of them had seen in a year. The villagers, many of them in tears, cheered and clapped as the men of Grimethorpe Colliery marched back to work accompanied by the village’s world-famous brass band. The miners and their families had endured months of hardship. It had all been for nothing. The miners had lost the strike called on March 6th 1984. They would lose a lot more in the years to come. But was it a good thing for the country that the miners lost their last battle?

Jesse Ventura Shocks the World

25 years after the pro wrestler shocked the world when elected Governor of Minnesota, it's high time to explore the people, values and experiences that shaped him.

Mémoires d'un condamné

Brothers on the Line

Brothers on the Line explores the extraordinary journey of the Reuther brothers – Walter, Roy, and Victor – union organizers whose unshakeable devotion led an army of workers into an epic human rights struggle.

These were the reasons

This film takes us into the harsh realm of BC's early coal mines, canneries, and lumber camps; where primitve conditions and speed-ups often cost lives. Then, the film moves through the unemployed' struggles of the '30s, post WWII equity campaigns, and into more recent public sector strikes over union rights.

The Seafarers

Members of the American Federation of Labor, the Atlantic & Gulf Coast District of the Seafarers International Union commissioned budding filmmaker and magazine photographer Stanley Kubrick to direct this half-hour documentary. The director's first film in color, it is more of an industrial film than a documentary, it served as a promotional tool to recruit sailors to the union.

The Seventh Fire

When gang leader Rob Brown is sentenced to prison for a fifth time, he must confront his role in bringing violent drug culture into his beloved American Indian community in northern Minnesota. As Rob reckons with his past, his seventeen-year-old protégé, Kevin, dreams of the future: becoming the most powerful and feared Native gangster on the reservation.

A Century of Struggle

A Century of Struggle chronicles the hundred-year history of the NZ Seamen’s Union from its formation in 1879. Using original film and archive footage, it examines the working lives of seamen and the battles fought by their union from the sailing ships of colonial days to the modern turbine-powered container vessels. Because the Seamen’s Union was frequently at the forefront of working-class struggle in New Zealand, its story involves most of the crucial issues and events in the history of the union movement generally, including the great maritime strikes of 1890 and 1913 and the waterfront dispute of 1951.

American Dream

When workers at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota are asked to take a substantial pay cut in a highly profitable year, the local labor union decides to go on strike and fight for a wage they believe is fair. But as the work stoppage drags on and the strikers face losing everything, friends become enemies, families are divided and the very future of this typical mid American town is threatened.

Cocalero

A documentary centered on the union formed by Bolivian farmers in response to their government's (which was urged by the U.S.) effort eradicate coca crops, and the man who would come to represent them, Evo Morales.

Freshwater

Freshwater is a documentary that dives into the cold waters of Lake Superior along Minnesota’s North Shore. Despite the fact that it contains ten percent of Earth’s freshwater, this massive force of nature remains largely unexplored. One group of people, however, is intimately aware of its power. From the surfers who catch its waves to the scientists who study its depths, learn why Lake Superior is a precious resource that should never be taken for granted.

Conversations Between Shifts

A portrait of Chicagoland ICU nurse Jeanette Alvarez-Basem captured through the perspective of her son Ben Basem. Between her night shifts and Illinois Nurses Association union meetings, Jeanette navigates what it means to be a nurse and a human during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Justice in the Coalfields

This film demonstrates how labor law has crippled the collective bargaining power of unions and weighed the scales of justice against working people. The documentary follows the 1988 United Mine Workers strike against the Pittston Coal Company that followed the expiration of their contract and Pittston's termination of the medical benefits of 1,500 pensioners, widows, and disabled miners.