ROCHESTER LABOR FILM SERIES

Films for Interesting Times

A joint effort of the Dryden Theatre and the Rochester Labor Council, the Rochester Labor Film Series presents motion pictures celebrating workers around the world. The first film program of this kind in the nation, we show dramas, comedies and current documentaries on important issues relating to work and workers, especially aspects of work often marginalized or absent in dominant commercial media. Our films from around the world are selected to inform, provoke and inspire.

This year’s Program is composed of films that depict the forces, be they direct or from afar, that shape workers’ lives. Life-draining features of the bureaucratic workplace are poignantly portrayed in Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic, Ikiru, and its 2022 remake set in England, Living. Carambolages depicts a worker’s comical attempts to move up the company ladder in a firm in France. In The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, Abigail Disney gives an inside candid account of heartless company policies behind the wholesome façade of her family’s amusement empire. Bad Axe documents the struggles of a multi-racial family to maintain the American dream during the national tumult over the pandemic and far-right politics. The power of patriarchy to span time and place is seen in the story of a woman CEO during the 1930s in Female and in the documentary on a women-run Indian newspaper in Writing with Fire. The struggles between labor and the state over national welfare policy are presented in The Spirit of ’45 for post-war Britain, and for contemporary Chile in My Imaginary Country.

Learn About the 2023 Labor Film Screenings this Fall

See you at the movies!