A young and devoted morning television producer is hired as an executive producer on a long-running morning show at a once-prominent but currently failing station in New York City. Eager to keep the show on air, she recruits a former news journalist and anchor who disapproves of co-hosting a show that does not deal with real news stories.
This documentary follows 8 teens and pre-teens as they work their way toward the finals of the Scripps Howard national spelling bee championship in Washington D.C.
Kuwait’s constitution says that every person has the right to a job, so in some places 20 people are employed for one person’s job. In South Korea, they work so much that a policy has been introduced to turn off computers at the end of the day so that employees can’t work any more. In the US, they give up over 500 million holiday hours each year, while Amazon’s drivers are trying to form a union. Meanwhile, robots are poised to take over most jobs and put the rest of us out of work. Work is so crucial to our identity and what we spend our waking hours on that it is barely noticed anymore. A lot has happened since a group of Puritan priests invented the concept of work ethic in the 1600s, and in the 21st century the very concept of work is in many ways disintegrating. A perfect situation for a filmmaker like Swedish mastermind Erik Gandini, who travels the world to explore what the concept of work means today – if it means anything at all.
Fong (Miriam Yeung) is already at odds with Wu (Edison Chen), one of her bosses at an ad agency, when she makes a major mistake at work that puts her job on the line. To save herself, she feigns pregnancy, which, under Hong Kong law, means she cannot be fired for 10 months. However, while there may be some perks that accompany her "pregnancy," she is eventually forced to concoct increasingly elaborate lies and involve everyone around her in the charade.
After losing his job during lockdown, Natan signs up to a microtask website. Having become a “Turker” alongside tens of thousands of others, he is paid a cent for each face he erases on Google Street View. Under the guise of Otto, a fictional character, he embarks on an experimental and playful investigation into “clickworkers”, haunted by the spectre of Beckett.
An introverted office drone tries to navigate through corporate America, and one tragic day he meets his match. He then realizes he needs to play the capitalistic game in order to survive. His pain and confusion is your laughter.
Split Cherry Tree is a 1982 short film directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. A father learns the importance of education and gains an understanding of his son and an insight into his dreams and ambitions. The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.
Side by side in a leafy suburb, Thom lives in one flat, Alethea in another. It's pretty clear that their respective, unsatisfying lives would improve enormously if they just met each other. But with a wall literally between them, this seems highly improbable. Then there's the building's Power Box, having an existential crisis about the eventual collapse of the universe, and the super nova from five thousand years ago. Then there's time travelling on an equation for the speed of light and too much sugar. There's demon magpie attacks, laptops in love, cats dancing to Prince and sock puppet nightmares. And a tiny prayer by the Wall, hoping that all of these pieces can come together for one magical moment of love.
“Sweet Bananas traces the contrasting lives of some working class and upper class women, who end up all getting along.” -- E. Ann Kaplan
Burning Out is literally a drama about life and death. For two years, the Belgian director Jérôme le Maire followed the members of a surgical unit in one of the biggest hospitals in Paris. Constantly under severe stress, understaffed and subject to severe budget cuts, employees fight each other for resources. Meanwhile the management imposes ever more stringent efficiency and profitability targets. All over Europe burnout has reached epidemic proportions among employees in the public and private sectors. Will we end up killing ourselves? Or will we be able to find meaning and joy at work?
With the energy of the dying, those in power apply themselves to reasserting the value of work – with force, if need be. But more and more workers have understood that, to truly value their work, they have to do without it. They also have to get rid of the society of consumption that goes along with it. It may not be easy, but it is certainly amusing. We present a panorama of a mass desertion destined to spread.
During a documentary shoot, Cheun, a beloved traffic warden, gets into trouble with a local inspector. On Rue Clignancourt, his resignation has the effect of a street light going out. In this new darkness, a filmmaker must rediscover his humanity, while Cheun must continue to invent his cinema. The rest doesn’t matter.
Documentary about the poor circumstances in the process of manufacturing iPhones - about mineworkers in Rwanda, illegal workers in Shenzhen, and repair-techs in Hamburg.