Strike! The Village That Fought Back

In Nevada’s remote Thacker Pass, a fight for our future is playing out between local Indigenous tribes and powerful state and corporate entities hellbent on mining the lithium beneath their land. Vancouver-based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine at Thacker Pass, but for more than two years several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action.

Portrait of a community in the heart of South Wales almost one year into the miners' strike of the 1980s.

A main agenda of the prewar farmer's movement was struggle against landowners. Prokino also considered this as their prime concern. The main title sequence and the latter part of the film have unfortunately been lost. While we cannot see its entire structure, we can still get a glimpse of it from this surviving short.

In the 1970's, filmmakers Tom Burger, Bill McKiggan and Chuck Lapp began documenting the history and current struggles of inshore fishermen in Atlantic Canada to form a union. Until 1979 it was illegal for fishermen to form a union in Nova Scotia. The committed funding from the National Film Board was withdrawn for this film, however the filmmakers continued to edit the film by entering the NFB at night. The CBC refused to broadcast the film, but it was finally released in 1990 and broadcast nationally that year on Vision TV.

Textile workers recall with pride the long- suppressed story of the General Textile Strike of 1934 when 500,000 Southern mill laborers walked off their jobs.

Documentary following dockers of Liverpool sacked in a labour dispute and their supporters’ group, Women of the Waterfront, as they receive support from around the world and seek solidarity at the TUC conference.

Lee Anne Schmitt explores California's landscape and past to document the history of one-time boom towns built and abandoned by the industries that necessitated their creation. Sold as a limitless land expansive with free opportunity, California was actually, from its onset, fissured by the interwoven needs of private and public interests. Schmitt's film covers various locations through time, as the major industries of the early 20th century (mining, lumber, oil) give way to the military, eventually leading to multinational corporations, and the use of small towns as satellites for growing urban metropolises.

Delegates and workers discuss the issues that effect the Timberworkers’ Union, the reasons for the formation of the Combined Council of Timber Workers Delegates (CCD) and their industrial action.

I have been pretty satisfied with my life before I got on the bus. When I do in June 2011, my whole life turns upside down. I am just a regular passenger at first. Like other people I was sorry, and felt obliged to help and care for other passengers. Then I begin to film these common heroes with my camera. Those who speak about hope, who provide it and get on the bus, Ms. Kim Jin-suk, and other crane laborers who risk their safety while demonstrating for their rights on high. She, while stationed insecurely on high, begins interacting with the world through Twitter and makes friends. Then I realize I really love her. Will we have her back safely?

Gdańsk, Poland, September 1980. Lech Wałęsa and other Lenin shipyard workers found Solidarność (Solidarity), the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. The long and hard battle to bring down communist dictatorship has begun.

In the cobalt mining areas of Katanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), babies are being born with horrific birth defects. Scientists and doctors are finding increasing evidence of environmental pollution from industrial mining which, they believe, may be the cause of a range of malformations from cleft palate to some so serious the baby is stillborn. More than 60% of the world’s reserves of cobalt are in the DRC and this mineral is essential for the production of electric car batteries, which may be the key to reducing carbon emissions and to slowing climate change. In The Cost of Cobalt we meet the doctors treating the children affected and the scientists who are measuring the pollution. Cobalt may be part of the global solution to climate change, but is it right that Congo’s next generation pay the price with their health? Many are hoping that the more the world understands their plight, the more pressure will be put on the industry here to clean up its act.

A new uranium mill -- the first in the U.S. in 30 years -- would re-connect the economically devastated rural mining community of Naturita, Colorado, to its proud history supplying the material for the first atomic bomb. Some view it as a greener energy source freeing America from its dependence on foreign oil, while others worry about the severe health and environmental consequences of the last uranium boom.

Dancing in Dulias was made by members of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) and Lesbians Against Pit Closures during and immediate after the 1984/85 minders strike. Like the forthcoming movie, Pride, it documents the interactions between lesbians and gay men and the miners and their families in Dulais in South Wales - only this time it's the real thing. As well as some memorable footage that includes the Blaenant Lodge banner leading the 1985 Lesbian and Gay Pride march and LGSM members struggling with bingo at the local community hall, the film documents the wider political impact of this seemingly unlikely alliance. (cont. http://www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk/films/2014/dancing-in-dulais#sthash.HScQCj7E.dpuf)

On the 5th of March 1985, a crowd gathered in a South Yorkshire pit village to watch a sight none of them had seen in a year. The villagers, many of them in tears, cheered and clapped as the men of Grimethorpe Colliery marched back to work accompanied by the village’s world-famous brass band. The miners and their families had endured months of hardship. It had all been for nothing. The miners had lost the strike called on March 6th 1984. They would lose a lot more in the years to come. But was it a good thing for the country that the miners lost their last battle?

Join the working men of a northern powerhouse: on the job in Gateshead workshops and at the long wall of a Northumberland pit.

Action 37

In 1992 – 500 years after the beginning of Spain's global empire with the discovery of America – Spain proudly presented itself to the international community as a modern, developed, dynamic country through the Olympic Games in Barcelona and the Expo in Seville. But for filmmaker Luis López Carrasco (1981, Murcia), 1992 was also the year in which the regional parliament building in Cartagena was razed during furious protests against the threatened closure of various local industries. El año del descubrimiento revives this almost forgotten history in a typical Spanish bar in Cartagena, where different generations come together to drink, eat, smoke and talk. Stories from witnesses, demonstrators and strikers from back then and discussions among younger café visitors on themes such as class consciousness, the economic crisis and the role of unions percolate to the surface amidst talk of other life issues.

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.

‘VIGO 1972’ narrates the events which took place in Vigo in September 1972, when the firing of five Citröen auto workers resulted in the largest general strike in the history of Galicia — with over thirty thousand workers — all of this during the Franco dictatorship in Spain.

In this feature documentary, filmmaker Paul Cowan offers an innovative, moving account of the Westray coal mine disaster that killed 26 men in Nova Scotia on May 9, 1992. The film focuses on the lives of three widows and three miners lucky enough not to be underground that day when the methane and coal dust ignited. But their lives were torn apart by the events. Meet some of the working men, who felt they had no option but to stay on at Westray. And wives, who heard the rumours, saw their men sometimes bloodied from accidents and stood by them, hoping it would all turn out all right. This is a film about working people everywhere whose lives are often entrusted to companies that violate the most fundamental rules of safety and decency in the name of profit.