A Bonus For Irene is a short film set in a factory in West Germany in 1971. The drama focuses on Irene, a divorced, single mother working in a dishwasher appliance factory. She is pissed off. The factory is roasting, the wages are shit, and they call upon them for overtime like they should just…
I Am Somebody is a short film documentary covering the 1970 strike of hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina. Initially just 400 black women went on strike for equal pay to their white colleagues, a raise in their wage of $1.30 an hour, and an end to derogatory comments made about their sex and race.…
Made in Bangladesh is a drama about a woman’s struggle to set up a union in a garment factory. It begins with a co-worker perishing in a workplace fire, obviously taking from real events like the 2012 factory fire disaster in Dhaka. Shimu and her friends feel distraught but helpless. When Shimu is contacted by…
To Be A Woman is a short film from the 1950s. It open with that plummy voice, “What of the woman of today? What does she want in the 1950s?” The Pathe News male voice puts forth these questions against an RP female voice setting forth the arguments for equal pay. You’d think this would…
The Chambermaid is a film about Eve, an indigenous worker in a luxury hotel in Mexico. The film is shot from entirely within the hotel. It is as though the director wants to see if you can tell the story of someone’s full humanity through the keyhole of their work. Because work is where you…
Fannie’s Film is a documentary short focusing on Fannie, an elderly African-American woman who works as a cleaner in a gym in the 1980s. She talks about her life and her work, as the film shows her picking up towels, wiping down mirrors, and dusting the blinds. The visuals are only of the gym, the…
Comets is this beautiful, heartfelt movie about love set almost entirely in a garden in Georgia. It is almost like a play more than a film, with characters discussing the most intense and meaningful of emotions with relatively little action or plot. It almost feels like the film takes place in real time, bookended by…
Our People Will Be Healed is about the Cree First Nation reservation school at Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. It begins its story there and then spirals out to encompass the entire community, showing how change ripples out. This film is so uplifting, full of hope. So many stories told about indigenous peoples focuses on the…
That was a hard watch. I cried throughout. To See You Again is a documentary about women searching for their missing loved ones in Mexico. In Morales, the families of the missing band together and win the right to have government mass graves opened, and to exhume the bodies for identification. Not trusting the authorities,…
I really wanted to see this film at the Femspectives festival in February, but I missed it because I felt like shite. They actually intended to having other screenings of it later on, but those have now also been cancelled due to the coronavirus. So fuck it, I’m watching it on Netflix with Femspectives at…