From the Woes of Work to Autonomy

Hannah, Laure, Adrien, and Halima are students at the Regional Institute of Social Work in Paris. Four students among the fifty in the first year of training to become educational support workers. They chose this profession out of commitment and vocation. Between the classroom and their field placements, they will confront their dreams and ideals with the realities on the ground, discover new sides of themselves, and begin to shape the contours of the profession they will practice—each in their own way.

The oldest Quebecois Benedictine convent open its gates to a documentary filmmaker for the first time. Observed up close, life behind its walls is busier than one would expect. About twenty cloistered nuns, most of them over 70, share their daily life with diligence and humor. A contemplative portrait of a community of sisterhood and solidarity emerges, punctuated by prayer, work and games evenings.

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.

It is a fetish, a mantra, a secret religion to modern man: work. In times of the financial crisis and massive job reductions, this documentary movie questions work as our 'hallow' sense in life in a way that both humors and pains us.

Somewhere in Myanmar is a forest rich in amber and controlled by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). Most of its inhabitants work in a mine, digging the earth night and days in the hope of finding the precious ore that will get them out of poverty. But on top of the excruciating hardship of the work, they also have to fear an attack from the army.

The film explores the potential for automation in every sector of employment and questions the integrity of our methods of resource distribution going into the future.

Stylized with dramatic interiors and a distorted frame rate, this early documentary miniature from Szulkin depicts six sequences of solitary, repetitious labor.

Longyearbyen, Svalbard, is the northernmost settlement in the world. About 3000 polar bears and 400 snow scooters outnumber its 2700 inhabitants. It is a place where you can actually see climate change and social diversity.

At the beginning of the 70s, Sahia Studio produced a number of social investigations commissioned by the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, intended to expose the so-called "social parasitism". The decision was taken after the theses of July 1971, which provide that "one of the main objectives of political work, especially among the youth, is the firm fight against the tendencies of parasitism, of an easy life, without work, the cultivation of responsibility and the duty to work , in the service of the country, the people, the socialist society". The most famous films, made with the competition of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice, are Să treacă vara and Iarna unor pierde vară