When a western Pennsylvania auto plant is acquired by a Japanese company, brokering auto worker Hunt Stevenson faces the tricky challenge of mediating the assimilation of two clashing corporate cultures. At one end is the Japanese plant manager and the sycophant who is angling for his position. At...
Hilarity ensues when a falsely accused fugitive from justice hides at the house of his childhood friend, which she has recently rented to a high-principled law teacher.
In nineteenth-century Łódź, Poland, three friends want to make a lot of money by building and investing in a textile factory. An exceptional portrait of rapid industrial expansion is shown through the eyes of one Polish town.
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 an industrializing Italian town, a married woman, rendered mentally unstable after a traffic accident, drifts into an affair with a friend of her husband.
A ruthless corporate raider is forced to return to his small town roots where he suddenly inherits his father's nearly bankrupt pencil factory, which is the heart and soul of the depressed community. With the foreclosure deadline looming, he must decide to either let it close, or join the...
Norma Rae is a southern textile worker employed in a factory with intolerable working conditions. This concern about the situation gives her the gumption to be the key associate to a visiting labor union organizer. Together, they undertake the difficult, and possibly dangerous, struggle to unionize...
In 1970s England, three blue-collar friends spend their days joking, drinking, fighting and chasing girls. Freddie wants to leave their working-class world but cool, charismatic Bruce and lovable loser Snork are happy with life the way it is. When Freddie gets a new job as a door-to-door salesman...
Ambitious young Jodie wants more out of life than the small Texas country town she lives in has to offer. Jodie realizes that in order to pursue her dreams she will have to leave Texas and move to the big city. However, her shiftless factory worker boyfriend Kyle wants to stay in Texas.
Naive Stanley Windrush returns from the war, his mind set on a successful career in business. Much to his own dismay, he soon finds he has to start from the bottom and work his way up, and also that the management as well as the trade union use him as a tool in their fight for power.
In 1877, in a watch factory in a valley in north-western Switzerland, Josephine produces balance spindles, tiny parts that ensure the agitation movement ("unrueh") of the mechanical watches. She soon grows uneasy with the organisation of work and possession in the village and its factory and joins...
Guillaume has made it: A machine that can clean dirty air by simply sucking all dirt into air balloons and then shipping them far far away so his explanation. Some Japanese business guys, after dinner with a lot of alcohol, order 5,000 pieces. His only problem: His production capacity is way to...
Working men and women leave through the main gate of the Lumière factory in Lyon, France. Filmed on 22 March 1895, it is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made, although Louis Le Prince's 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene pre-dated it by seven years. Three separate versions of this...
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...
The workers of an Indonesian factory that manufactures custom-made fake body parts have hidden dark and greedy sides, and the place’s elderly owner knows how to bring out those demons. Despite being warned by a Taiwanese visitor, a young woman seeks out the factory’s secret.
Liza falls in love with one of her father's employees. Her socialistic ideas about employment drive her to collide with her father and the sociopolitical status of the time.
Filip buys an 8mm movie camera when his first child is born. Because it's the first camera in town, he's named official photographer by the local Party boss. His horizons widen when he is sent to regional film festivals with his first works but his focus on movie making also leads to domestic...