Never Got a Dime

Never Got a Dime is the story of Lilly Ledbetter, a former manager at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Gadsden, Alabama.

Women of the Workforce:WOW

The Workforce Development Institute/ NY created "Women’s Initiative" to focuse on programs that help women become self-sufficient and reach their potential. The Women’s initiative provides opportunities for women from diverse backgrounds to come together and exchange ideas about issues faced by working women. 8 minutes.

Taking the Heat

Captain Brenda Berkman of the FDNY broke every barrier in her rise to be one of the few women to lead an FDNY station, and she paid the price. She is a true hero of NYC and a hero to workingwomen everywhere.

Q & A with Brenda Berkman Captain, FDNY (retired)

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On The Merits

This film is a serious look back at the crazy years of the Ed Koch administration, when Mayor “How Am I Doing?” was busy handing out patronage goodies to sleazy lawbreakers and outright criminals, while honest civil servants languished on the legal hiring lists. 33 minutes

Made in the USA

Veteran journalist Bill Gillespie heads south (to the US) to find out the real impact of what the conservatives are planning for working people in Ontario. 20 minutes

Expect Resistance

Looks at the Take Back the Land and Occupy Wall Street movements as they began to respond to the foreclosure crisis.

Graciously sponsored by CWA1180 and the NY Labor History Association, as well as US Imaging Networks, Inc.

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The Story Of Broke 

The United States isn’t broke; we’re the richest country on the planet, and a country where the richest among us are doing exceptionally well. But the truth is, our economy is broken. The Story of Broke calls for a shift in government spending toward investments in clean, green solutions—renewable energy, safer chemicals and materials, zero waste, education.

Salt of the Earth - 60th Anniversary

Based on an actual strike against the Empire Zinc Mine in New Mexico, the film deals with the prejudice against the Mexican-American workers, who struck to attain wage parity with Anglo workers in other mines and to be treated with dignity by the bosses.

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Tax the Rich: An Animated Fairy Tale

A cartoon about how we arrived at this historical moment of poorly funded public services and widening economic inequality.

The Clara Lemlich Awards

In this short but touching film about the past year's Lemlich Award recipients, filmed by the Workforce Development Institute, we see many strong and active women, well into their nineties, still fighting, still organizing and still causing trouble for the 1% types.Their accomplishments in social and labor organizing are a revelation! 15 minute

Bargaining Table and Souls 

This film offers humanizing portraits of Goddard College faculty whose lives have been fraught by a climate of uncertainty in the pursuit of job fairness and dignity, over the past year of Collective Bargaining negotiations. 4 minutes

Maestra

Explores the experience of eight women who, as young girls, taught on the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961.The film begins in 1961, when Cuba announced that they would eradicate illiteracy in one year.

Parents of the Revolution

'Parents of the Revolution' follows a group of activist parents in the Occupy Wall Street movement who believe that it's their democratic duty to teach their kids to speak out against injustice.

Q & A with Director Dana Glazer and participants in the film

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This documentary gives an in-depth insight into the profound crisis that Greece is facing today. The country, which is facing the seventh year of a deep recession, is in a state of absolute collapse at all levels: financially, socially and politically.

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These documentaries highlight the struggles of workers from China, Turkey, South Africa and Haiti. Countries. Showing just a few of the similarities and differences between labor movements.

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Meeting Face to Face; The Iraq-U.S. Labor Solidarity Tour

Meeting Face to Face follows six senior Iraqi labor leaders as they tour 25 U.S. cities speaking to union audiences, university forums, and community gatherings.

Iraqi Workers After The War 

This short video gives voice to Iraqi workers and union leaders – men and women - as they explain the repression they face, the efforts they are making to secure a new labor law that allows Iraqi workers to form unions, and their call for international labor solidarity.

10 Years On: Afghanistan & Pakistan

This tightly focused documentary shows how after a decade of war, US attacks have spread the conflict across the border into Pakistan.

Q & A w/directors Kathleen Foster,  Michael Zweig &  Regional Expert, Fatima Mojadd

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Behind every activist that fought for civil rights or occupied Wall Street, there was a loved one who also sacrificed. Tatanka follows the bizarre and heartrending journey of one man whose unchecked idealism helped change the world but nearly tore his family apart.

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Salute to the Social Documentary Program of the School of Visual Arts 

A celebration of SVA’s Social Documentary MFA program, with shorts and features from students highlighting the next generation of socially conscious filmmakers.

First Year Student Shorts:

Willets Point - A Different World Within NYC 

 Dana Kalmey's experimental video using auto shop sounds for soundtrack. A short ride on the 7 into Queens brings you into a complex, ethnically-diverse world, vastly different from the city that envelopes it - this is Willets Point.

Holy Apostles Church Soup Kitchen -  

John Redmond's no holds barred portrait of the homeless population of downtown Manhattan, as they come to get the good food provided for the community by the Chelsea Church of the Holy Apostles.

MFA Graduate Student Films: 

Hart Island (trailer)

In NYC the poor, unknown and premature infants were buried quickly and anonymously by NYC’s prisoners in a desolate potters field off the Coast of City Island. Erik Spink  & Amitabh Joshi's Hart Island goes to the root of the indignity, for these already marginalized people, when even in death, or thru death of a premature child, the unequal civic system takes one more shot at pushing them to the bottom of the ladder.

Tooth Fairy

This film follows a 5 foot tall dynamo of a working people’s dentist, as she tries to make her way as a professional, both serving the working class neighborhood of Washington Hgts.

Truth Through A Lens

This film follows the evolution of Brooklyn street kid, subway train tagger and local community organizing legend, Dennis Flores.

Q & A w/ director Justin Thomas & Community Activist, Dennis Flores 

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Overpass Light Brigade

'Overpass Light Brigade' is a short film that tells the story behind Wisconsin's Holders of the Lights using innovative time-lapse photography and interviews with founding members and other activists.

Sky Blue Collar

A businessman and a carpet installer enjoy a wild and playful friendship, but when their class-conscious bosses pressure them to steer clear of each other, the Romeo and Juliet of the workaday world must decide what's more important: how we make a living, or who we're living for.

Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class

Class Dismissed brilliantly navigates the steady stream of misleading representations of America’s working class, from the dawn of TV’s Golden Age, to our current crop of reality shows, sitcoms, police dramas, fake courtroom shows and daytime talk shows.

 Q & A for Murphy Institute