The End of the Endless

Common sense says you can't make a living in America playing avant-garde improvisational jazz. But Ken Vandermark does it anyway. Among musicians, Vandermark's work ethic is almost mythic. The Chicago reed player has released over 100 albums with nearly 40 ensembles, spends over eight months per year on the road, and lives every other waking moment composing, arranging, performing—and trying to discipline his two hyperactive canines. Though Vandermark was the recipient of a 1999 MacArthur genius grant, he still spends most of his life in smoky clubs and low-budget recording studios, hoping people will plunk down hard-earned cash to hear his wholly non-commercial music. Following the artful cinéma vérité style of the internationally acclaimed Sheriff (Work Series #1), Musician (Work Series #2) forgoes all interviews and voice-overs. It is a fly-on-the-wall time capsule that expertly captures every subtle sound and texture of this most American of art forms.

The gestures, the words, the rites of a day like any other in the offices of a large insurance company.

Our premise is that work has become an act of self-sabotage. Empty corporate jargon, ever-changing management fashions and self-serving bureaucracy masquerading as efficiency hijacked the purpose of work. Creative documentary The Happy Worker will show how we got to this point and the very human behavior that led us here. We want to show how this unhealthy system is maintained and what keeps us from calling bullshit.

You've never heard of Jonathan Hoefler or Tobias Frere-Jones but you've seen their work. They run the most successful and respected type design studio in the world, making fonts used by the Wall Street Journal to the President of the United States.

Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists.

Agricultural scientist and mother Isolde struggles with the dicrepancies between her personal convictions and the political realities in East Germany.

36 year old welder Karin works at an agricultural factory in Mecklenburg, Germany.

It is a fetish, a mantra, a secret religion to modern man: work. In times of the financial crisis and massive job reductions, this documentary movie questions work as our 'hallow' sense in life in a way that both humors and pains us.

Short documentary on the shunters in the Darling Island, Sydney, Australia railyard. Filmed in 1977.

Handbook of Movie Theaters’ History is a documentary about the history, the development in the present days and the future of movie theaters in the city of Turin, Italy. It mixes the documentary language with comedy and fiction, and is enriched by interviews to some of the most important voices of Turin cinematography. The film follows the evolution of movie theaters by enlightening its main milestones: the pre-cinema experiences in the late 19th Century, the colossals and the movie cathedrals of the silent era, the arthouse theaters, the National Museum of Cinema, the Torino Film Festival, the movie theaters system today and the main hypothesis about its future.

This documentary follows a group of women on a typical workday as they prepare meals for a dockyard in Rostock. The viewer never learns their names - there are no interviews. The women are presented simply as workers: cooking, cleaning, hauling, and serving dishes amid clanking pots and hot steam.

There is a popular theory that it takes at least 10,000 hours of focused practice for a human to become expert in any field. In Japan, there are craftspeople who go far beyond this to reach a special kind of mastery. These people are called Takumi and they devote 60,000 hours to their craft. That's 8 hours a day, 240 days a year, for over 30 years. It's an almost superhuman level of dedication to a life of repetition and no shortcuts. This film asks the question: Will human craft disappear as artificial intelligence reaches beyond our limits?

Workplace is a documentary made by Gary Hustwit, in association with R/GA, for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.Workplace is about the past, present, and future of the office. It looks at the thinking, innovation, and experimentation involved in trying to create the next evolution of what the office could be. The film follows the design and construction of the New York headquarters of digital agency R/GA (in collaboration with architects Foster + Partners) who have been experimenting with how physical and digital space can better interact. Digital technology has radically changed how and where most of us work, but the physical spaces we work in haven’t kept up with that transformation.

Stylized with dramatic interiors and a distorted frame rate, this early documentary miniature from Szulkin depicts six sequences of solitary, repetitious labor.

Take a deep dive into the booming, scantily-clad barista coffee shop scene in Seattle where sex sells - your morning coffee. But behind the intrigue of lingerie and java lurks a darker side, where female "bikini baristas" struggle with the troublesome and inappropriate behavior of their male clientele. At what cost are merchants willing to foster a culture of sexual harassment and use sex to push profit?

The life and work of a retired model maker.

Isaac, a failed actor and Skies employee, shows us the daily life of workers in an average call center, facing the boredom to get to the end of the work day.

Les Couturiers de l'Église

Faber

Violeta and Vyollca Dukay live in the south of Kosovo, close to the border with Albania. Faced with a very high unemployment in their country since the end of the war, they became deminers. They’ve been going to the minefields every day for six years now. The unique and very strong relationship that exists between the two sisters helps them to overcome their fear and to keep hoping in spite of the precariousness of their situation and the risks they run each day to earn their living.