Works and Days

Until recently, cinema began after the workers left the factory. Now there’s no after-hour left: since it has become a total spectacle, a show both private and of public interest, work must go on no matter what, in the corporation that exists everywhere between factory, office, and home. Capitalism saves capitalism: for our century has become so cynical and emotionally overwhelming that sometimes it feels like it would be morally impossible to live such an anguishing life without work being all-encompassing enough to alienate it day after day. With clear minds and hearts shaking from emotion, the films in Works and Days bring to the screen what is but a second nature to life in capitalism, a diffuse desperation of contemporaneity that takes control over the portrait and landscape, day and night, dream and nightmare. (Călin Boto)

Very Gentle Work

Nate Lavey | Duration 23’ 55"

Through a fictional protagonist’s psychogeographic research into militant revenge and Jewish tradition, Very Gentle Work connects Sholem Schwarzbard, the Black Liberation Army, FALN and Weather Underground to the ongoing struggle against a proposed police training center near Atlanta, Georgia.

To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion

Valentin Noujaïm | Duration 14'

Claire, a businesswoman promoting a new skyscraper office in La Défense, faces increasing scrutiny and isolation. The cold, grey offices amplify her loneliness, driving vivid dreams of setting the tower ablaze.

The Seventh Shift

Nataliya Ilchuk | Duration 15'

A portrait of a solitary woman who works four jobs in a nearly abandoned Ukrainian town. Continual ritual gestures that do not involve obtaining a profit and an irrational faith in the unattainable become the main basis of the film, while its prosaic reality is not being expressed explicitly but through the visual poetry of an industrial town in decay.

for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world

Gala Hernández López | Duration 19' 06"

A woman dreams of the American cryptographer Hal Finney. A major economic crisis affects the cryptocurrency market, tens of thousands of people are cryogenized awaiting better times. Are they suspended or falling into the void? What strange relationship do we have with the future?

Workers’ Wings

Ilir Hasanaj | Duration 19'

Men who have suffered work injuries are looking at us. How do they feel? What are their hopes? What does the future hold for them? Every line on their faces is sculpted by life itself. In contrast, a system filled with danger and injustice looms overhead.