This free event takes place on Thursday, August 31, 2023 at 6:30pm at Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center’s Howard Gilman Theater. Tickets will be distributed, first-come, first-served beginning at 5:30pm on Aug. 31.

As the current SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes remind us, American film history is inextricable from the long and robust history of the American labor movement. This program of archival 16mm shorts—curated by Elena Rossi-Snook, Collection Manager at the New York Public Library, from their Reserve Film and Video Collection—offers a dazzling glimpse at cinematic microhistories of work, workers, and solidarity struggles across industries: from the New York Post Office to General Motors; from millworkers in North Carolina to hospital workers in South Carolina.

Join us for a special free screening at Film at Lincoln Center, followed by a conversation with Rossi-Snook and filmmaker Brett Story, moderated by Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute.

Undelivered: No Such Country
Ralph Arlyck, 1975, U.S., 10m
A behind-the-scenes look at the work of the main New York Post Office as it sorts vast amounts of materials.

Loose Bolts?
Peter Schlaifer, 1973, U.S., 28m
Deals with work on assembly lines. Interviews employees at a General Motors automobile plant in order to show their reactions to this well-paid but potentially dehumanizing type of work.

Crystal Lee Jordan
1975, U.S., 16m
Follows mill worker Crystal Lee Jordan as she attempts to organize the workers at the J. P. Stevens mill in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. Shows how she combines her struggle as a union organizer with her life as a wife and mother. Her stand formed the basis of the feature film Norma Rae.

I Am Somebody
Madeline Anderson, U.S., 1970, 28m
A documentary record of the 113-day strike by members of the National Union of Hospital and Nursing Home Employees in Charleston, South Carolina during the Spring of 1969.  Explores the struggles of these low-paid, Black, and mostly female hospital workers to achieve economic justice, dignity and self-respect. Illustrates how organized labor and the civil rights movement succeeded in forging an effective coalition in the South. An Icarus Films release.