In September and October 2009, the Dryden Theatre and the Rochester Labor Council join forces again for a 20th season of motion pictures celebrating international citizens who work for a living.
As a reflection of the current economic recession, many of our selections this year are about what it means to be out of work and forced to take employment where one is overqualified, like the middle-aged, white-collar careerists in Tokyo Sonata (September 4 & 6) from Japan; Days and Clouds (September 18) from Italy; and Laila’s Birthday (October 30) from Palestine. It shouldn’t be surprising that frustration and stress come with the territory for the jobless in these films. While multinational perspectives reveal that many things are the same all over, the differences make the movies (and the series) continually fascinating, like the way the families of the unemployed characters react in Tokyo Sonata (with extreme dysfunction) and Laila’s Birthday (with warmth and support).
From China, a nation still in the midst of an economic revolution, comes acclaimed filmmaker Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (October 9), a part-fiction/part documentary look at what happened when an aircraft plant with more than 20,000 employees was demolished to make way for luxury condominiums. There are two series selections that explore the lives of the poor and working-class in South America. First, in the seriocomic The Pope’s Toilet (October 2), a penniless, always-scheming entrepreneur tries to cash in on a visit from John Paul II by installing a pay-per-use potty in his impoverished Uruguayan village. Then, in Oblivion (October 16), Dutch filmmaker Hedy Honigmann visits with the people of Lima, Peru: bartenders, shoeshine boys, small business owners, and gymnasts and jugglers who perform at traffic stops.
This year’s US selections include the Oscar®-nominated documentary The Garden (September 11), which depicts the inspiring story of a group of low-income families who struggle to protect a 14-acre urban farm in the middle of South Central Los Angeles from real estate developers. Via American director John Ford and the 20th Century Fox sets in California, we are transported to the hardscrabble Welsh mining town of How Green Was My Valley (September 25), the film that beat Citizen Kane for the Best Picture Oscar® of 1941. Vintage Hollywood pictures also get their due on October 23 with a ’30s double feature of Three-Cornered Moon and Mills of the Gods, two movies that offer slices of life from that other economic disaster, the Great Depression.
