Himlens mörkrum

In 2007, unable to compete with cheaper offshore production, Hooker Furniture Co. closed its plant in Martinsville, Virginia, after 83 years in operation. With These Hands follows the last load of wood down the assembly line as it is cut, honed, and assembled into fine furniture. Along the way, employees at the factory share their perspectives on work, community, and survival in a country devastated by de-industrialization and outsourcing.

Immigrant workers build a shopping mall for the upcoming 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. In 2016, nine people with migrant backgrounds are killed in a racist attack at the same mall.

In Work A Lot, Memphis Depay steps off the pitch and into the daily lives of the people who keep São Paulo moving. The mini-documentary weaves interviews with Brazilian workers — from street vendors to truck drivers, from bakers to hairdressers — with behind-the-scenes moments of Depay’s own life in Brazil, spanning music, football, and visits to local communities. Stripped of glamour and filters, the film connects different realities through a shared truth: working hard isn’t a lifestyle choice, it’s survival. A raw, urban and honest portrait of daily struggle, belonging, and real life.

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.

At the beginning of the 70s, Sahia Studio produced a number of social investigations commissioned by the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, intended to expose the so-called "social parasitism". The decision was taken after the theses of July 1971, which provide that "one of the main objectives of political work, especially among the youth, is the firm fight against the tendencies of parasitism, of an easy life, without work, the cultivation of responsibility and the duty to work , in the service of the country, the people, the socialist society". The most famous films, made with the competition of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice, are Să treacă vara and Iarna unor pierde vară

The oldest Quebecois Benedictine convent open its gates to a documentary filmmaker for the first time. Observed up close, life behind its walls is busier than one would expect. About twenty cloistered nuns, most of them over 70, share their daily life with diligence and humor. A contemplative portrait of a community of sisterhood and solidarity emerges, punctuated by prayer, work and games evenings.

The film explores the potential for automation in every sector of employment and questions the integrity of our methods of resource distribution going into the future.

Longyearbyen, Svalbard, is the northernmost settlement in the world. About 3000 polar bears and 400 snow scooters outnumber its 2700 inhabitants. It is a place where you can actually see climate change and social diversity.

A dance, expressed with interviews of people with jobs such as a daycare teacher, call center employee and cashier. The film reveals reality of the controlled emotion behind the kind ‘smile’ of the jobs.

Hannah, Laure, Adrien, and Halima are students at the Regional Institute of Social Work in Paris. Four students among the fifty in the first year of training to become educational support workers. They chose this profession out of commitment and vocation. Between the classroom and their field placements, they will confront their dreams and ideals with the realities on the ground, discover new sides of themselves, and begin to shape the contours of the profession they will practice—each in their own way.

Inside DPD

Somewhere in Myanmar is a forest rich in amber and controlled by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). Most of its inhabitants work in a mine, digging the earth night and days in the hope of finding the precious ore that will get them out of poverty. But on top of the excruciating hardship of the work, they also have to fear an attack from the army.

L'initiation

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

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.

NOCH ACHT STUNDEN

The viewpoints of women from a country that no longer exists preserved on low-band U-matic tape. GDR-FRG. Courageous, self-confident and emancipated: female industry workers talk about gaining autonomy.

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.

Women from Turkey and Mecklenburg are working together side-by-side at a fish-processing factory in Lübeck. As they work, they share stories about their lives, including their sorrows, griefs, hopes, and dreams, while expressing their longing for home and feelings of being lost in a foreign place.

Oscar, not quite a child anymore, scavenges for scrap metal for his father. He spends his life in improvised landfills among what remains of leftovers. Worlds apart, yet close-by, there is Stanley. He tidies the church in exchange for a monetised hospitality, picks fruits, herds sheep: anything that keep his foreign body busy. Oscar, the young Sicilian, and Stanley the Nigerian don’t seem to have much in common. Except for the feeling of being thrown into the world, to suffer the same refusal, the same overwhelming wave of choices imposed on them by others.