Film

The Wobblies

A 1979 documentary portrait of the Industrial Workers of the World, told through aging members' voices, archival photographs, and period songs. It captures a radical labor movement that challenged American capitalism with idealism and risk, building something that outlasted itself. Essential for understanding how labor rights were actually won.

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Harlan County U.S.A.1976

Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning film about a 1973 coal miners' strike captures the same grit, solidarity, and sacrifice. You see workers on the ground fighting for dignity, supported by their families and each other.

But It's a slow burn with no triumphant ending. The strike drags on, conditions worsen, and the outcome feels incomplete rather than resolved.

Harlan County U.S.A. poster

Salt of the Earth1954

Banned and then restored, this film about a miners' strike in New Mexico was made with the very workers it depicts. It has the emotional honesty of lived experience and genuine rage at injustice.

But The acting is deliberately non-professional, which some find powerful and others find distracting. The pacing is stately rather than urgent.

Salt of the Earth poster

American Factory2019

A modern echo of the Wobblies' struggle: a documentary about Chinese factory owners in Ohio clashing with American workers over automation and wages. It shows labor conflict is still urgent and unresolved.

But It feels more like a business story than a manifesto. You're observing, not being moved to conviction.

American Factory poster

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Killer of Sheep1978

Where *The Wobblies* is about collective action against exploitation, this is about what exploitation looks like from inside a single man's day. They're reverse sides of the same coin.

Charles Burnett's collage of a man's life working in a slaughterhouse, shot on a shoestring. It's about exhaustion, dignity stolen by labor, beauty found anyway. A quiet, devastating portrait of what work does.

But There's almost no plot. Scenes fragment, connections are implicit, and the pace is glacial. Some will call it a masterpiece; others will call it boring.

Killer of Sheep poster
More like this (3)

Union2020

A short documentary about Amazon warehouse workers organizing. It shows the Wobblies' spirit alive in 2020: workers finding collective power against overwhelming odds.

But At only 40 minutes, it feels like an introduction rather than a full investigation. You'll want more.

Union poster

Nanook of the North1922

Not political, but a founding documentary that showed how to tell stories through images and lived experience rather than authority. It's a grandfather to the form *The Wobblies* uses.

But It's a silent film, which requires patience. And Flaherty's romanticism of hardship hasn't aged perfectly.

Nanook of the North poster

The Ax Fight1975

Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon's anthropological film strips away narrative authority and lets footage speak. It's experimental in exactly the ways *The Wobblies* could have been.

But At 30 minutes of a single incident with multiple reconstructions, it's more puzzle than story. Some find it brilliant; others find it exhausting.

The Ax Fight poster

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Harlan County U.S.A., Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists, La Longue Marche, Juvenile Court