Documentary / History
How Finnish immigrants came into contact — and conflict — with industrial America. Three generations of Finnish-Americans recount how they coped with harsh realities by creating their own institutions: churches, temperance halls, socialist halls, and cooperatives.

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Magical, autonomous, all-powerful… Artificial intelligences feed our dreams as well as our nightmares. But while tech giants promise the advent of a new humanity, the reality of their production remains totally hidden. While data centers are concreting landscapes and drying up rivers, millions of workers around the world are preparing the billions of data that will feed the voracious algorithms of Big Tech, at the cost of their mental and emotional health. They are hidden in the belly of AI. Could they be the collateral damage of the ideology of “Longtermism” that has been brewing in Silicon Valley for several years?

OBAIDA, a short film by Matthew Cassel, explores a Palestinian child’s experience of Israeli military arrest. Each year, some 700 Palestinian children undergo military detention in a system where ill-treatment is widespread and institutionalized. For these young detainees, few rights are guaranteed, even on paper. After release, the experience of detention continues to shape and mark former child prisoners’ path forward.

This raw, gutsy portrait of New York's Chinatown captures the early days of an emerging consciousness in the community. We see a Chinatown rarely depicted, a vibrant community whose young and old join forces to protest police brutality and hostile real estate developers. With bold strokes, it paints an overview of the community and its history, from the early laborers driving spikes into the transcontinental railroad to the garment workers of today.

Shedding light on the current debate over immigration reform and the use of "guest workers" in American agriculture, this historical documentary, "Harvest Of Loneliness: The Bracero Program," examines what was known as the Bracero Program-a system put in place from 1942 to 1964 to recruit Mexican farm laborers for temporary work in the United States.

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.

In 1843, despite the fact that Dickens is a successful writer, the failure of his latest book puts his career at a crossroads, until the moment when, struggling with inspiration and confronting reality with his childhood memories, a new character is born in the depths of his troubled mind; an old, lonely, embittered man, so vivid, so human, that a whole world grows around him, a story so inspiring that changed the meaning of Christmas forever.

Every December to January, almost a hundred squid fishing boats from Ch'ien-chen Fishing Harbor in Kaohsiung will sail from East 120 to West 60 to work at Falkland Islands in the South West Atlantic. The sailing takes 35-40 days and crew members named it "waterway." January 1st, 2015, a 65 meter long, 11 meter wide fishing boat began its journey to Falkland island. This is a documentary about 60 crew members from south-east Asia to work far away from Taiwan.

In response to the Detroit riots of 1967, where racial tensions in the city reached a breaking point, the city decided that the way to resolve these tensions would be to put more resources into employing Black people. Namely, chronically unemployed Black men who they refer to as "the hardcore." And predominantly, employing them on the line in auto assembly plants. But in the words of Lloyd Love, a young Detroiter interviewed in the film, this PBS documentary poses the question, "Do you think a job is the answer?" The film explores this question in 1968, by speaking with workers, unemployed people, union activists, students, people who implement city-run employment programs, members of DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement), and the Detroit Industrial Mission.