Crude Oil

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.

Moving between a local microcosm and the global oil crisis, H2Oil weaves together a collection of compelling stories of people who are at the front lines of the biggest industrial project in human history: Canada's tar sands. H2Oil is a feature-length documentary that traces the wavering balance between the urgent need to protect and preserve fresh water resources and the mad clamoring to fill the global demand for oil. It is a film that asks: what is more important, water or oil? Will the quest for profit overshadow efforts to protect public health and the environment in Canada's richest province?

In this evocative meditation, a disturbing link is made between the resource extraction industries’ exploitation of the land and violence inflicted on Indigenous women and girls. Or, as one young woman testifies, “Just as the land is being used, these women are being used.”

Through the testimony of Manuel Taborda, a pioneer of labor organizing in Venezuela’s oil fields, this documentary revisits the experiences of oil workers between 1920 and 1936. Their memories reveal a world marked by corporal punishment, exploitation, racial segregation, and disease, alongside the emergence of collective resistance against the American and British oil companies that controlled the industry and the government that enabled them.

Training and Customer Service information film sponsored by the Marketing Retail Sales Department of the Standard Oil Company. Features product placement for brands like Atlas and Chevron.

In China’s popular live-streaming showrooms, three millennials – a karaoke singer, a migrant worker and a rags-to-riches comedian – seek fame, fortune and human connection, ultimately finding the same promises and perils online as in their real lives.

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.

Wiebo Ludwig is the leader of a Christian group who brought his family to live in Alberta, Canada, 25 years ago in order live a life according to scripture. They built a small, self-sufficient community in a place that they did not realize was one of the largest undeveloped natural gas fields in North America. Unlike others who lived in the area, Wiebo and his family refused to sell their land and move, and now Wiebo is the prime suspect in a series of pipeline bombings and other acts of sabotage against the local oil industry.

In an oil-scarce world, we know there are sacrifices to be made in the pursuit of energy. What no one expected was that a tiny Native community, living down the river from Canada's tar sands, would reach out to the world for help — and be heard.

The story of the children who work 12-14 hour days in the fields without the protection of child labor laws. These children are not toiling in the fields in some far away land. They are working in America.

A more experimental aproach to labor protection films. In the line of Săucan's style, the soundtrack is as important as the image, the threatening music, full of shrillness, composed by Ion Dumitrescu potentiating the visual construction that mixes - in a montage reminiscent of the Soviet avant-garde school of the 1920s - all kinds of shooting techniques and frame combinations.

This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.

It's a warm spring night, and the bee cowboys of Prince Edward Island begin rounding up their hives.

The inauguration ceremony of the monument to the victims of the Harel Brigade of the Palmach during the War of Independence in the cemetery in Kiryat Anavim. A glimpse into the work of the fishermen of Kibbutz Nachsholim on their ship Nachshol, sailing towards the fishing grounds off the coast of Turkey. A veterinarian performs surgery and removes nails and glass from a cow’s stomach. And finally, a request not to throw away cigarette waste where it could cause a fire.

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.

Few of us have stopped to consider the lives of the workers who manufacture the objects that make up our daily lives. We use these objects without knowing anything about the Foxconn plants in which they are made, or even where these factories are located, let alone who works in them. One such worker was the young Chinese poet Xu Lizhi, who, at the age of 24, jumped out of a building not far from where he worked at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen.

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.

The causes underlying the collapse of civilizations are usually traced to overuse of resources. As we write this, the world is reeling from economic chaos, peak oil, climate change, environmental degradation, and political turmoil. Every day, the headlines re-hash stories of scandal and betrayal of the public trust. We don't have to make outraged demands for the end of the current global system - it seems to be coming apart already. But acts of courage, compassion and altruism abound, even in the most damaged places. By documenting the resilience of the people hit hardest by war and repression, and the heroism of those coming forward to confront the crisis head-on, END:CIV illuminates a way out of this all-consuming madness and into a saner future. Backed by Jensen's narrative, the film calls on us to act as if we truly love this land. The film trips along at a brisk pace, using music... Written by Franklin Lopez

The drastic economic development in South Korea once surprised the rest of the world. However, behind of it was an oppression the marginalized female laborers had to endure. The film invites us to the lives of the working class women engaged in the textile industry of the 1960s, all the way through the stories of flight attendants, cashiers, and non-regular workers of today. As we encounter the vista of female factory workers in Cambodia that poignantly resembles the labor history of Korea, the form of labor changes its appearance but the essence of the bread-and-butter question remains still.

A bare-knuckled critique of corporate America told through the powerful true story of a toxic CEO who evolves from a profits-over-people, philandering executive to an unorthodox leader, populist messenger, and mentor to American influencers. It’s a story of growth, redemption and the impact of self-awareness on leadership and life.