The Night Before the Strike

When a western Pennsylvania auto plant is acquired by a Japanese company, brokering auto worker Hunt Stevenson faces the tricky challenge of mediating the assimilation of two clashing corporate cultures. At one end is the Japanese plant manager and the sycophant who is angling for his position. At the other, a number of disgruntled long-time union members struggle with the new exigencies of Japanese quality control.

In nineteenth-century Łódź, Poland, three friends want to make a lot of money by building and investing in a textile factory. An exceptional portrait of rapid industrial expansion is shown through the eyes of one Polish town.

Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, three auto assembly line workers hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters.

The workers in a small plough factory take over the firm, but when a large order falls through, the old management come back to help out.

Dramatization of the true story of the so-called Willmar Eight, a group of Minnesota bank workers who braved freezing conditions whilst picketing their branch in a struggle for union rights.

A working class teenager comes of age in 1910s rural Sweden, moving through a series of jobs and romances that gradually shape his future.

A portrait of union leader James R. Hoffa, as seen through the eyes of his friend, Bobby Ciaro. The film follows Hoffa through his countless battles with the RTA and President Roosevelt.

La Califfa's husband was killed during the strikes so she takes the side of the strikers. Her conflict with the plant owner Doverdo gradually turns into a love relationship.

Iris is a shy and dowdy young woman stuck in a dead-end job at a match factory, who dreams of finding love at the local dancehall. Finding herself pregnant after a one-night stand and abandoned by the father, Iris finally decides the time has come to get even and she begins to plot her revenge.

Angie is a working class woman. After being fired, she decides to set up a recruitment agency of her own, running it from her kitchen with her friend, Rose. Taking advantage of the desperation of immigrants, Angie builds a successful business extremely quickly.

A Finnish man goes to the city to find a job after the mine where he worked is closed and his father commits suicide.

A Czech immigrant in 1960s America escapes into musicals while working long hours in poverty. Struggling with hereditary blindness, she is determined to secure her son’s future and will sacrifice everything to ensure he receives the operation that could spare him from her fate.

A solitary nurse bonds with a badly burned patient who survived an accident on an oil rig.

Ichiro’s family used to be a large landowner, but now he is living in poverty with his mother. His mother works hard to get her son through school. Under such circumstances, Ichiro meets Wakako, the daughter of a wealthy man, and they fall in love with each other, but they are opposed by those around them because of their different social status.

After the funeral of one of their own, a criminal family decides to embark on an emotionally unnerving journey in an attempt to exact bloody revenge.

A week in the life of the exploited, child newspaper sellers in turn-of-the-century New York. When their publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, tries to squeeze a little more profit out of their labours, they organize a strike, only to be confronted with the Pulitzer's hard-ball tactics.

Wallace is an efficiency expert, managing the high-profile downsizing of a major auto parts factory. But when he is hired to evaluate a small moccasin factory which seems from another era, Wallace has to reconsider the rapid modernization he advocates, as he is confronted by the human faces such plans hurt.

After being compared to a dancing monkey by one of the factory owners, Wayne, a factory worker sets out to find an answer to a question that will decide his fate and those around him.

In post-World War I Winnipeg, a Ukrainian immigrant and a Jewish woman get caught up in a labour strike.

The Turin factory, another in a series of closures, shuts down, leaving workers jobless and uncertain. Salvatore, a worker, climbs the tower in protest or rage, threatening to jump. Giorgio, a shop steward with opposing political beliefs, saves him. The third worker, a visually impaired and autistic keeper, joins them, climbing the tower to keep them company. Abandoned by everyone, they wait for journalists to arrive. These diverse perspectives reflect the past thirty years of life in the country, marked by wasted opportunities, betrayed hopes, crimes, massacres, and political power struggles. We watch through archive footage, contrasting this wicked dance of events with the simple common sense of three people with no power, hanging on a tower, building a friendship without realising it.