The Wages of Fear

The Wages of Fear 1953

8.01

In a run-down South American town, four men are paid to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin into the jungle through to the oil field. Friendships are tested and rivalries develop as they embark upon the perilous journey.

1953

Norma Rae

Norma Rae 1979

7.20

Norma Rae is a southern textile worker employed in a factory with intolerable working conditions. This concern about the situation gives her the gumption to be the key associate to a visiting labor union organizer. Together, they undertake the difficult, and possibly dangerous, struggle to unionize her factory.

1979

The Paradise of Thorns

The Paradise of Thorns 2024

7.69

When his partner Sek dies, Thongkam loses his property to his late love's eager family and must fight to reclaim the home they built together.

2024

WALKA!

WALKA! 2024

8.00

France: 2020s. Piotr, a young Polish immigrant stuck in a string of odd jobs, crosses paths with Stefano, a burly mover. Little did Piotr know, this encounter would soon draw him into the eerie world of nighttime fighting.

2024

Convicts

Convicts 1991

5.47

In 1902, 13-year-old Horace toils on a run-down plantation in rural Texas to buy a tombstone for the father he lost a year earlier. Soll, the crusty old Confederate who owns the plantation and depends on convict labor to keep his farm running, takes a liking to Horace. However, Soll is aging and sinking into senility, making the possibility of Horace ever getting his pay increasingly unlikely. On Christmas Eve, as Soll becomes obsessed with his own mortality, he makes a grand promise... forcing Horace to confront his fear of death and the harsh truths of a decadent society.

1991

Car Wash

Car Wash 1976

5.95

This day-in-the-life cult comedy focuses on a group of friends working at Sully Boyar's Car Wash in the Los Angeles ghetto. The team meets dozens of eccentric customers -- including a smooth-talking preacher, a wacky cab driver and an ex-convict -- while cracking politically incorrect jokes to a constant soundtrack of disco and funk. Some of the workers find romance as the day moves along, but most are just happy to get through another shift.

1976

Footsteps

Footsteps 2022

1

In Footsteps, Fiona Tan creates connections between personal stories and the world around us. The footage shows children at play and Dutch windmills, but above all people engaged in heavy physical labour in the countryside and in factories. In a fascinating juxtaposition, she combines these images with excerpts from letters she received from her father just after she moved to the Netherlands in the late 1980s. Through his education in Indonesia, Tan’s father knew a lot about the Netherlands without ever having visited the country. In the letters, he meanders seamlessly between personal news and world events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.

2022

Ip Man 2

Ip Man 2 2010

7.46

Having defeated the best fighters of the Imperial Japanese army in occupied Shanghai, Ip Man and his family settle in post-war Hong Kong. Struggling to make a living, Master Ip opens a kung fu school to bring his celebrated art of Wing Chun to the troubled youth of Hong Kong. His growing reputation soon brings challenges from powerful enemies, including pre-eminent Hung Gar master, Hung Quan.

2010

Youth (Spring)

Youth (Spring) 2023

6.82

This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.

2023

Rat Man

Rat Man 1988

5.01

After a model is brutally murdered on a Caribbean island, her sister's investigation uncovers a horrifying rat-like creature.

1988

Open files

Open files 1975

1

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.

1975

Harlan County War

Harlan County War 2000

7.10

A Kentucky woman whose mine-worker husband is nearly killed in a cave-in, and whose father is slowly dying of black lung disease, joins the picket lines for a long, violent strike.

2000

Doi Boy

Doi Boy 2023

6.29

Sorn, an ethnic Shan sex worker, tries to build a future in Chiang Mai, Thailand, as a refugee far from home, but he is drawn into a complex relationship with one client, an investigator probing a political activist.

2023

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven 1975

7.60

Frau Emma Küsters prepares dinner late one seemingly-ordinary afternoon in her seemingly-ordinary Frankfurt kitchen. She wants to add canned sausages to the stew; her irritating daughter-in-law thinks otherwise. But the point is moot: Ernst Küsters has not only murdered the personnel director at the soap factory where he's employed but succeeded that by committing suicide.

1975

Walkout: The School Funding Rebellion

Walkout: The School Funding Rebellion 2018

1

The lowest paid teachers in the nation are in the middle of a statewide walkout in Oklahoma. From start to finish, Walkout follows the teachers as they get organized and demand raises from their state legislature. From crowded classrooms to a packed state capitol, Walkout offers an in-depth, personal look at the latest strike at the heart of a nationwide movement for education funding.

2018

Harlan County U.S.A.

Harlan County U.S.A. 1977

7.50

This film documents the coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastover's 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.

1977

Induced Labor

Induced Labor 2018

6.66

Some people will do anything to secure an American visa, as hard as that might be. Some enter lotteries, others beg friends and families to invite them. Others still, just sneak in and hope Mr Trump doesn’t notice they are there. But in this raucous comedy, one Egyptian couple come up with a splendid wheeze. With twin babies due any minute, and all other efforts to secure citizenship fail, the couple decide to storm the US Embassy in Cairo and give birth there. Surely that will mean the babies are born as Americans, right? Well, er, no. As you might expect, things don’t quite go according to plan…

2018

Homebound

Homebound 2022

1

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.

2022

La vida no vale nada

La vida no vale nada 1955

8.10

Pablo, a wandering laborer, has imprisoned himself in a hell of alcoholism. Cruz, a widow, reaches out to the troubled man, but even her compassion may not be enough to save him.

1955

Cleaners

Cleaners 2015

1

Migrating is seldom an easy solution. It is rather a journey, that begins with a journey. After more than eight years of campaigning, the immigrant cleaners outsourced at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London continue to demand being brought in-house. Limpiadores charts the history of their and others’ campaigns – from winning the London Living Wage to the deportation of nine colleagues, and the day-to-day invisible labour of cleaners on our campus.

2015