Blow for Blow

Young women at a precision optics factory in wartime Japan push to exceed production quotas, enduring illness, injury, and personal hardship to “serve the country.” Led by Tsuru Watanabe, they fight fatigue and setbacks to keep their line moving—even when duty collides with grief.

A specialist nurse is given responsibility for a baby boy with a serious heart condition in the middle of nurses’ strike. She is left balancing between her own family, the baby boy and her loyalty for nurses’ cause.

Sanda spends all her time working in a plastic factory, raising her two small children and catering to an indifferent husband, leaving little room for herself. A chance encounter with another man may offer her an escape from her daily chores.

In the late 19th century, a former high school teacher turned unionist tries to organize workers laboring with inhuman conditions at a textile factory in Turin, Italy.

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.

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

To recoup losses from the extravagant roadshow presentations of Intolerance (1916), Griffith would revisit his epic film three years later by releasing two of the film's previously interlocked stories as standalone features, with additional footage and new title cards. The second of these was 'The Mother and the Law', which demonstrates how crime, moral puritanism, and conflicts between ruthless capitalists and striking workers cause ruin to the lives of marginal Americans.

After promising 1100 employees that they would protect their jobs, the managers of a factory decide to suddenly close up shop. Laurent takes the lead in a fight against this decision.

A dramatization of the 1968 strike at the Ford Dagenham car plant, where female workers walked out in protest against sexual discrimination.

A chronicle of the lives of the Gibbons family, from shortly after the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second.

In an insurrectionary climate, four twenty-year-old friends talk about politics. As a big protest looms, one of them, Clara, has to write a college essay. Caught in the virtual images and the comfort of her bedroom, going out is harder than expected.

Anna and Joe are newly married, playful and deeply in love. Joe is scraping by as cab driver in New York City during a period of corruption, mob control and violence between cab companies.

After losing a finger in a work accident, an Italian worker becomes increasingly involved in political and revolutionary groups.

A strike at a French sausage factory contributes to the estrangement of a married filmmaker and his reporter wife.

Set against the backdrop of an increasingly violent strike, a worker falls in love with the middle-class daughter of his landlady.

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.

Suburbanite Ron is spoiled, young and not overly worried about the marijuana charges leveled against him. But, after being made out to be a drug dealer, he faces a five-year jail sentence in San Quentin State Prison. Physically frail and unaccustomed to his rough surroundings, Ron is primed to fall victim to sexual predators and bullying guards – that is, until he's befriended by Earl, a veteran inmate who finds meaning in protecting the vulnerable new kid.

County Durham, England, 1984. The miners' strike has started and the police have started coming up from Bethnal Green, starting a class war with the lower classes suffering. Caught in the middle of the conflict is 11-year old Billy Elliot, who, after leaving his boxing club for the day, stumbles upon a ballet class and finds out that he's naturally talented. He practices with his teacher Mrs. Wilkinson for an upcoming audition in Newcastle-upon Tyne for the royal Ballet school in London.

In the early years of the 20th century, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a British-trained lawyer, forsakes all worldly possessions to take up the cause of Indian independence. Faced with armed resistance from the British government, Gandhi adopts a policy of 'passive resistance', endeavouring to win freedom for his people without resorting to bloodshed.

The lives of several individuals intertwine as they go about their lives in their own unique ways, engaging in acts which society as a whole might find disturbing in a desperate search for human connection.