Labor goes to the Movies

Now in its 34th year, the AFI European Union Film Showcase continues its tradition of bringing the best in European cinema to Washington, DC-area audiences. This year's selection includes 53 films from all 27 EU Member States, 11 of them are top contenders for this year's Academy Award® for Best International Feature Film and 13 U.S. and North American premieres. Three of the films are co-presente...

Films about work shape our attitudes toward labor and laboring, often by inviting us to identify with individual characters. But what happens when film presents a more direct experience of what workers actually do? In a column for the Working-Class Perspectives blog, James Catano considered three non-fiction films about the fishing industry: Drifters (1929), Pescherecci (1958), and Leviathan (2013...

Elise and Chris discuss Who Killed Vincent Chen? (1987) and Complicit (2016) with Virginia Rodino and Heather White, who will be participating in a panel discussion on “Understanding AAPI Hate: Building A Movement of Solidarity and Resistance” on Sunday, July 18 at 7pm. Both films are available now (through July 18) for free online screening . Virginia Rodino is president of the Maryland chapter o...

With just one week to go before the 2021 DC Labor FilmFest wraps up, Labor Goes to the Movies co-host Chris Garlock sat down with Tom Zaniello – author of “Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds and Riffraff, An Expanded Guide to Films About Labor” – for his “Best of the Fest” picks. All the 2021 films are still available in the AFI Silver’s DC Labor FilmFest Virtual Screening Room , through Sunday, Ju...

Lincoln Cushing and Harvey Smith discuss The New Deal For Artists, now showing in the DC Labor FilmFest . Narrated by Orson Welles, this remastered classic features interviews and commentary by John Houseman, Studs Terkel, Howard Da Silva, Arthur Rothstein, Joseph Losey, Norman Lloyd and more. Archivist and historian Lincoln Cushing is the author of All Of Us Or None: Social Justice Posters of the...

Kathy M. Newman on “Paradise Lost: The Spectacular Failure of The Whistle at Eaton Falls.”Newman is an English professor at Carnegie Mellon who writes regularly on class and culture and who’s currently at work on a book entitled “Backstory: Film, Television, and Social Class in the 1950s,” which includes an entire chapter on the rarely-seen – and recently restored – 1951 film The Whistle at Eaton...

Viewer reaction to Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice, plus Elise and Chris get into the critical weeds on Miss Marx, the film about Karl Marx’s youngest daughter. Elise loved it but Chris isn’t so sure. But hey, you be the judge; you can watch Miss Marx and all of the films released so far in this year’s DC Labor FilmFest in the AFI Silver’s DC Labor FilmFest Virtual Screening Room . PLUS: sneak...

We cover a lot of ground on our first Labor Goes to the Movies Movie Club session, from an in-depth discussion of Ida B. Wells to the worker origins of zombies. Plus we get a fascinating glimpse into Elise’s Detroit theater roots and…is The Death of Stalin a labor movie? Plus the trailer for Miss Marx, which opens on Tuesday May 11; check out the complete line-up for the 2021 DC Labor FilmFest . I...

Introducing Silver Streams , the terrific podcast from the programming team at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center , the longtime home of the DC Labor FilmFest . We love working with Todd, Abby and Ben and we also love their podcast and wanted to share it with you to give you a sense of just how deep their knowledge and enthusiasm for the movies is. In this episode, Todd, Abby and Ben go de...

Labor historians Joe McCartin (Georgetown University) and Steve Brier(CUNY School of Labor) join Haymarket: The Bomb, the Anarchists, the Labor Struggle director Adrian Prawica on a special May Day discussion, moderated by LGTTM’s Chris Garlock. Their wide-ranging discussion not only connects the events of 1886 in Chicago to the broader world at the time, but to our own lives and struggles today,...

In Part 2 of our chat with Todd Hitchcock, Director of Programming at the American Film Institute Silver Theatre and Cultural Center , he picks out some of his favorite selections in the 2021 DC Labor FilmFest , now underway in the AFI’s Virtual Screening Room. The new film Haymarket: The Bomb, the Anarchists, the Labor Struggle is being screened free online today by the Global Labor Film Festival...

Chris talks with Todd Hitchcock, Director of Programming at the American Film Institute Silver Theatre and Cultural Center . In Part 1 of our chat with Todd, he talks about how AFI has kept the movies coming during the pandemic, and we get a peek behind the glitz and glamour of attending star-studded film festivals at Cannes, Berlin and Toronto, as Todd reveals some of the workaday details of bein...

Chris and Elise talk with director Adrian Prawica about his new film Haymarket: The Bomb, the Anarchists, the Labor Struggle , which is being screened free online this coming week by the Global Labor Film Festival Network , which will also include two online discussions with Adrian on May Day, Saturday, May 1, one at 8p Eastern time with labor historians Joe McCartin (Georgetown University) and St...

Chris talks with director (Matewan, 8 Men Out) and novelist (Union Dues, Yellow Earth) John Sayles, about Martin Eden, Pietro Marcello’s adaptation of Jack London’s autobiographical novel. “The part both in the book and the movie that always meant the most to me is the part where he's whacking away at that typewriter,” says Sayles. “I actually had an electric typewriter; it was the first thing I e...

Elise and Chris talk with director Mark Street, whose latest film is Work Songs, which travels across the country talking with ordinary working folks; cab drivers, a farmer, longshore-women, a barista. Inspired by the work of the great Studs Terkel, Work Songs is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the United States at work as we face threats from automation, the gig economy and the decline of unions. Cel...

Elise and Chris discuss My Darling Supermarket, Identifying Features, Quo Vadis, Aida and Collective with retired SEIU staffer (and now buddhist monk) Peter Pocock and Empathy Media Labs’ Evan Matthew Papp. Everyday lives, the human face of migration, and a different point of view from women directors. NOTE: these films are all available online in AFI Silver’s Virtual Screening Room , along with t...

Elise and Chris discuss films from the DC Labor Filmfest Spring Screening Series with Andrea Arenas, Communications & Policy Coordinator for the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, and co-host of the El Desvio podcast (She’ll be doing the Q&A for IDENTIFYING FEATURES [SIN SEÑAS PARTICULARES] on Wednesday, March 31). We’re also joined by labor journalist Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won't...

Elise and Chris discuss “The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem” with director Yu Gu and mark the anniversary of “Salt of the Earth,” the classic labor film that opened on March 14, 1954 and was banned soon after. Includes trailer for A Woman’s Work and Salt of the Earth . CLICK HERE to watch the video version! Produced by Chris Garlock. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/...

Elise and Chris talk pandemics, movies and class with Tom Zaniello, a film and media scholar who has written several books on films about work and class, including Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraf f, The Cinema of Globalization , and The Cinema of the Precariat . He recently posted Not Just Viruses: What Epidemic Cinema Teaches Us about Working-Class Vulnerability on the Working Clas...

If you like movies and are interested in the labor movement, hang out with Labor Heritage Foundation Executive Director Elise Bryant and DC Labor FilmFest Director Chris Garlock as they kick back and talk about their favorite films and chat with guests about work and workers on the silver screen. On this first episode, Elise remembers that her neighborhood in Southeast Detroit didn’t have a movie...