New 4K Restoration!
Friday, May 1 at 6:30: Q&A with director Barbara Kopple and crew after the screening
Saturday, May 2 at 9:10: Extended introduction by director Barbara Kopple, co-presented by Jacobin Magazine
Already part of the documentary pantheon, Kopple won her second Oscar for this sobering chronicle of the explosive 1985-86 labor strike against Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota. Fed up with dangerous conditions and drastic wage cuts, Local P-9 went against the advice of their parent union and voted to walk out. But as the strike dragged on, some workers grew desperate and ready to cross the picket line, dividing a community already betrayed by a once-progressive company and roiled by blockades, riots, and the intervention of the National Guard.
"A bracing hybrid, a documentary and a lamentaion for those who create the country's wealth at the cost of their own dignity." - The Washington Post
"Ms. Kopple's stirring, forthright film captures an American town, the strength of its traditions and the deep and permanent ways in which those traditions can be destroyed. Her work is as important as it is good." - The New York Times
"Its focus on the smoldering economic fury of working-class Americans adroitly illuminates the reasons for the backlash that politicians of both parties are finding increasingly difficult to ignore." - The Los Angeles Times
Also playing: a new 4K restoration of Kopple's Oscar-winning HARLAN COUNTY USA