The Other Half(1919)

The struggle of a small group of blacksmiths trapped between keeping a long going strike with claims for better fees and the necessity of getting back to work when there's no money left for basic necessities.

La Califfa's husband was killed during the strikes so she takes the side of the strikers. Her conflict with the plant owner Doverdo gradually turns into a love relationship.

Ichiro’s family used to be a large landowner, but now he is living in poverty with his mother. His mother works hard to get her son through school. Under such circumstances, Ichiro meets Wakako, the daughter of a wealthy man, and they fall in love with each other, but they are opposed by those around them because of their different social status.

In near-future New York, ten years after the “social-democratic war of liberation,” diverse groups of women organize a feminist uprising as equality remains unfulfilled.

Anna and Joe are newly married, playful and deeply in love. Joe is scraping by as cab driver in New York City during a period of corruption, mob control and violence between cab companies.

Working with children led Barskaya to create superb direct sound and an inspired style of shooting. Don’t look for conventional cinematic syntax here. The film is chaotic in the way that Soviet films still knew how to be, and Langlois couldn’t help but be seduced by its rebellious spirit, its anarchy and love of children, comparable to Vigo’s Zero de conduite. As well as being a film made with and for children, it offers a complex take on Western society. Pre-Nazi Germany is not named as such but is carefully reconstructed, possibly under advice from Karl Radek, and children offer a playful reflection of class struggle – doubly excluded, as proletarians and as minors. “They play in the same way that they live”, one intertitle says. The interaction between their comical games and the yet more ludicrous ones played by adults is developed on several levels.

In 1920, workers from Patagonia, in Southern Argentina, gather around an anarcho-syndicalist society and go on strike, demanding better working conditions. When the situation turns unsustainable, President Yrigoyen sends Lieutenant Colonel Zavala to impose order.

Mary Rafferty comes from a poor family of steel mill workers in 19th Century Pittsburgh. Her family objects when she goes to work as a maid for the wealthy Scott family which controls the mill. Mary catches the attention of handsome scion Paul Scott, but their romance is complicated by Paul's engagement to someone else and a bitter strike among the mill workers.

In the late 19th century, a former high school teacher turned unionist tries to organize workers laboring with inhuman conditions at a textile factory in Turin, Italy.

A dramatization of the 1968 strike at the Ford Dagenham car plant, where female workers walked out in protest against sexual discrimination.

In post-World War I Winnipeg, a Ukrainian immigrant and a Jewish woman get caught up in a labour strike.