Movies: Labor

Inés works as a seamstress in a sweatshop where pregnancy tests are periodically administered. When she becomes pregnant, she is sure that her condition will get her fired. She does everything she can to keep it a secret....

The story of two young women who go to the city to work in a dress factory, and who share a room to ease their expenses and their loneliness. The film shows the currents that brought them together and the facets of their natures that first made them ...

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....

An experimental documentary exploring the turn-of-century lynching of union organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana....

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...

Lin, a migrant female worker from Cambodia, and Yeon-hee, a Korean, are friends who work together at a factory at night. One day, the two will go to the sea together for the weekend. However, the factory manager only forces Lin to work overtime on th...

Dioni, like every day, is late for work. His boss already warned him that if this happened again, he would leave him on the street. Someone is going to have to run if he wants to get paid this month......

It's not her turn, but she's pregnant....

Documents the conflicts and tensions that arise between highland migrants and Mosetenes, members of an indigenous community in the Bolivian Amazon. It focuses particularly on a system of debt peonage known locally as ‘habilito’. This system is used t...

Chidambaram is based on a short story by noted Malayalam writer C. V. Shriraman. The film is a deeply symbolic exploration of the man-woman attraction leading to betrayal and eventually to the purgatory of guilt....

This 1996 documentary takes a nostalgic ride through history to present the experiences of Black sleeping-car porters who worked on Canada's railways from the early 1900s through the 1960s. There was a strong sense of pride among these men and they w...

A description of the work of a research director of a United Steel Workers Union in Canada. The painstaking research and analyses of economic information, and the arrangement of arguments that lie beneath the negotiations of labour unions for better ...

Strong and independent Eliza works as the Polish teacher in a village school and begins an affair with local delinquent Stach. They have a child out of wedlock. When Stach is sent on forced labourer in Germany, Eliza and her child set off on an epic ...

Through first person narration, Tari reveals personal stories related to her decision to work in Taiwan, her strained family relationships, the risks involved in working abroad and the traps she has fallen into....

This short documentary is a tribute to the unknown father. Emerging filmmaker Danic Champoux poses the question "How many men still have to uproot themselves and leave their families to get work?" as he sets out to search for his own father. He wonde...

A blend of drama and documentary, this film follows several people caught up in the turmoil of the modern world. The drama centres on a woman who has burned out and who holds up her own despair – and her attempts to rebuild her life – as a mirror to ...

This extraordinary documentary is an unflinching record of the workers’ struggle during Japan’s economic rebirth in the 1980s, centered on Tokyo’s Sanya “yoseba”—a slum community dating from the 19th century where day laborers lived in terrible condi...

A desperate, but not very bright, young man tries to find where he parked his car in a massive underground parking garage in Cannes, France when his pregnant girlfriend goes into labor....

In August 2012, mineworkers in one of South Africa’s biggest platinum mines began a wildcat strike for better wages. Six days later the police used live ammunition to brutally suppress the strike, killing 34 and injuring many more. Using the point of...

World War II created a huge demand for American farm products. But the war also caused vast numbers of farm workers to abandon the fields, either to join the military or to seek work in the cities. The solution would be a unique contract-worker agree...