Full Frame Announces 18 Films for 2010 Thematic Program
Posted: 03-15-2010 : DURHAM, N.C.

Durham, N.C. - Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has announced 18 titles as part of the 2010 Thematic Program “Chair-Making, Pole-Dancing, Coal-Mining, Cart-Pushing: Films on Work and Labor.” Filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert of “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant”, have curated a series of films that allow us to see and feel the actual work people do around the world. The series includes films about the labor movement, globalization and especially the connection between work and identity.

“The process of selecting these films was really tough - there are so many terrific documentaries on themes of work and labor,” said Bognar and Reichert. “We hope our orchestration of cinematic collisions between contrasting documentaries gets people talking, thinking, arguing and engaging in the stories and issues raised by these films. We look forward to defending our choices with everyone at the Festival!”

Special support for Full Frame’s thematic series was provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Chair-Making, Pole-Dancing, Coal-Mining, Cart-Pushing: Films on Work and Labor

Chairmaker (Director: Rick DiClemente)
Spend time with Dewey Thompson as he transforms a tree into a rocking chair while sharing stories about a lifetime spent in Appalachia.

China Blue (Director: Micha X. Peled)
Shooting clandestinely, with smuggled equipment and under threat of arrest, director Micha Peled gains extraordinary access into life at a blue-jeans factory in China to give us an unprecedented look at the current state of Chinese labor.

Coal Miner: Frank Jackson (Director: Ben Zickafoose)
From the Appalshop archive, a rare trip down a 1970s Virginia coal mine with an expressive, engaging miner to tell us about union organizing, prejudice, and the coal-mining way of life.

The Global Assembly Line (Director: Lorraine Gray)
From Mexico to the Philippines to Tennessee, this remarkably prescient film, completed in 1986, examines the consequences both at home and abroad of the then relatively new American business practice of outsourcing manufacture and assembly jobs.

H-2 Worker (Director: Stephanie Black)
Each year thousands of Jamaicans spend six months cutting sugar cane by hand in Florida. They arrive with hopes of decent wages and a better life, only to find themselves exploited in ways that recall the shameful days of slavery.

Hammer and Flame (Director: Vaughan Pilikian)
In a surreal, unending cycle, workers at the shipbreaking yards of Gujarat in India take monstrous ships apart, bolt by bolt, using only the simplest of tools.

An Injury to One (Director: Travis Wilkerson)
Travis Wilkerson reconstructs the 1917 lynching of labor organizer Frank Little, drawing a parallel between the environmental degradation wrought by the Anaconda Mining Company in Butte, Montana, and the shattered dreams of social revolution.

John & Jane (Director: Ashim Ahluwalia)
Drilled in American popular culture and pronunciation, young Indian workers at a call center in Mumbai inhabit a surreal virtual world where their American identities, often eagerly adopted if ill fitting, are at odds with the reality of their lives.

Justice in the Coal Fields (Director: Anne Lewis)
Members of the United Mine Workers take over the Pittston Coal Company and wait for the cops to attack in this vérité recounting of one of the most important labor struggles of the second half of the twentieth century.

Live Nude Girls UNITE! (Directors: Vicky Funari, Julia Query)
Workers at the Lusty Lady, a notorious peepshow theater in San Francisco, set out to form the only strippers’ union in the United States.

Man Push Cart (Director: Ramin Bahrani)
A much-lauded independent fiction film about a former Pakistani rock star, now selling coffee and bagels on the streets of Manhattan and struggling to reclaim his life.

Morristown: In the Air and Sun (Director: Anne Lewis)
Morristown, Tennessee, and Juarez, Mexico, are being drawn closer together by the global economy, and the way their inhabitants live and work (or don’t) is a testament to how the dislocating effects of so-called free-trade agreements have cemented into place a permanent, migratory underclass within our borders, and within Mexico’s.

The Sixth Section (Director: Alex Rivera)
A weekly Saturday night gathering of fellow immigrants in chilly upstate New York turns into an exercise in serious philanthropy and the chance to make a significant difference in their hometown in Mexico.

The Target Shoots First (Director: Chris Wilcha)
Before becoming a successful filmmaker, a punk musician turned marketing assistant took his camera to work at Columbia House Records and for two years documented his unexpected rise to management, with results that are both funny and painful.

Taylor Chain (Directors: Jerry Blumenthal, Gordon Quinn)
In stirring 16mm, this portrait of a seven-week strike at a small steel chain factory offers remarkable access to picket line confrontations, tumultuous union meetings, and conflict-ridden negotiations.

Los Trabajadores (The Workers) (Director: Heather Courtney)
Immigrant day laborers in Austin perform some of the city’s most critical jobs but find themselves at the center of a town battle over the location of their depot, which nobody wants in their backyard.

The Uprising of ’34 (Directors: George Stoney, Judith Helfand, Susanne Rostock)
Through rare archival footage and participant interviews, this groundbreaking film recovers the long-suppressed history of the 1934 General Textile Strike, when hundreds of thousands of Southern cotton mill workers walked off the job.

The Wobblies (Directors: Stewart Bird, Deborah Shaffer)
Members of the Industrial Workers of the World, now in their eighties and nineties, reminisce about their union’s heyday—the textile strikes, free-speech battles, life in the lumber camps—in this meticulously researched history of the Wobblies.

The 2010 Full Frame Documentary Festival will be held April 8 through 11 in Durham, NC, with Duke University as the presenting sponsor. Festival passes are currently on sale at www.fullframefest.org . Full Frame’s film schedule will be announced March 18, and advance tickets go on sale April 1.

About Full Frame
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is an annual international event dedicated to the theatrical exhibition of non-fiction cinema. Each spring Full Frame welcomes filmmakers and film lovers from around the world to historic downtown Durham, N.C., for a four-day, morning to midnight array of over 100 films as well as discussions, panels, and southern hospitality. Set within a four-block radius, the intimate festival landscape fosters community and conversation between filmmakers, film professionals and the general public.

The festival is produced by Doc Arts, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and receives support from corporate sponsors, private foundations and individual donors whose generosity provides the foundation that makes the event possible. To learn more on the mission of Full Frame or for information on membership or sponsorship opportunities, scheduled films or festival passes visit www.fullframefest.org