Goodwin’s Way

An intimate, arresting portrait of the cursed Appalachian mining town of Ivanhoe, Virginia. The film captures the town as it prepares for the annual Jubilee, a wild 4th of July celebration where families and neighbors let loose and triumph over daily hardships, industrial abandonment, and race.

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.

The true story of the massacre of a small Czech village by the Nazis is retold as if it happened in Wales.

On April 6, 1980, the Canadian Farmworkers Union came into existence. This film documents the conditions among Chinese and East Indian immigrant workers in British Columbia that provoked the formation of the union, and the response of growers and labor contractors to the threat of unionization. Made over a period of two years, the film is eloquent testimony to the progress of the workers’ movement from the first stirrings of militancy to the energetic canvassing of union members.

Have you ever wondered what it is like to live on a Nike sweatshop wage? Watch the award-winning short film, Behind the Swoosh, and see Jim Keady and Leslie Kretzu attempt to survive on a Nike worker’s wage in the industrial slums of Indonesia.

An explosion in one of the largest chemical plants in Europe, the Petrochemical complex in Tarragona, triggers the labour struggle of a group of workers who demand what is fair for everyone.

Three decades after the shuttering of the mining town of Schefferville, the Innu people, who moved in after the non-natives abandoned the town, are facing a new challenge: the iron mines are about to be reopened. Land, identity and legitimacy are central to the dialogue between peoples locked in parallel struggles, the Québécois and the First Nations.

Pouvoir Oublier is a political documentary first constructed from the words of the speakers whose lives changed on the tragic day of May 10, 1972 in Sept-Îles. Their word will be juxtaposed with archival material from the events, some of which are unpublished, which will reflect the collective euphoria in which Sept-Îles and all of Quebec were then bathed.

Fresh off the plane and in need of money, two Finnish backpackers find themselves the latest batch of “fresh meat” sent to work as barmaids at the only pub in a remote Australian mining town.

The Confederation of Haitian Workers (CTH) invited an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) delegation to Haiti to learn about their fight against "le plan neoliberal" and recruit help in the form of material aid and solidarity. The delegation was in Haiti from April 24 to May 25, 2008, two weeks after the country erupted in mass protest at burgeoning food prices. This video shares the stories and experiences.

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.

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.

A film documenting work shortages during the Depression of the 1930s and the attempts to deal with the unemployed, in particular young men. The film discusses the establishment of relief camps and projects, where men were paid twenty cents per day; the founding of organizations such as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), Workers' Unity League, and Relief Camp Workers' Union; general unionization and protest of the unemployed, including the On To Ottawa Trek, Regina Riot, sit-in strike from May to June 1938 at the Vancouver Main Post Office, Vancouver Art Gallery and Hotel Georgia, and the resulting Bloody Sunday of June 19.

Horizons...

This award-winning documentary tells the true story of the final Confederate raid into what is now northeastern Oklahoma. The raid culminated in the capture of more than 300 Federal supply wagons at Cabin Creek in the Cherokee Nation. Now streaming on TUBI, PRIME VIDEO, TRUETVPLUS, and HISTORYFIX.

Documentary look at the 1996-97 effort of the dancers and support staff at a San Francisco peep show, The Lusty Lady, to unionize. Angered by arbitrary and race-based wage policies, customers' surreptitious video cameras, and no paid sick days or holidays, the dancers get help from the Service Employees International local and enter protracted bargaining with the union-busting law firm that management hires. We see the women work, sort out their demands, and go through the difficulties of bargaining. The narrator is Julia Query, a dancer and stand-up comedian who is reluctant to tell her mother, a physician who works with prostitutes, that she strips.

Allonias decides that enough is enough. He works 12-13 hours driving his taxi every day and still has no money left to pay for rent and clothes for their three children. He begins a battle against Sweden’s largest taxi company owned by billionaire Rolf Karlsson. It leads to Rolf Karlsson selling the entire empire for around 2-3 billion SEK. But for Allonias it has a high price…

In County Durham, England, 1984, a talented young dancer, Billy Elliot, stumbles out of the boxing ring and onto the ballet floor. He faces many trials and triumphs as he strives to conquer his family’s set ways, inner conflict, and standing on his toes in a musical that questions masculinity, gender norms and conformity.

Mary Surratt is the lone female charged as a co-conspirator in the assassination trial of Abraham Lincoln. As the whole nation turns against her, she is forced to rely on her reluctant lawyer to uncover the truth and save her life.

Since its adoption in June 1955 by the Congress movement, the Freedom Charter has been the key political document that acted as a beacon and source of inspiration in the liberation struggle against Apartheid. It was reputedly the main source that informed democratic South Africa’s liberal constitution and a constant reference point for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and rival political parties that it spawned since 1994, all claiming the Freedom Charter’s legacy. Freedom Isn’t Free assesses the history and role of the charter, especially in relation to key political and socio-economic aspects of developments in South Africa up to the present period. It includes rare archival footage with interviews of a cross-section of outspoken influential South Africans.