Union
Directed by:
Stephen Maing & Brett Story
On April 1, 2022 a group of ordinary workers made history when they did what everyone thought was impossible: they successfully won their election to become the very first unionized Amazon workplace in America. This feat would be extraordinary for any union, let alone the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), who did it with no prior organizing experience, no institutional backing, and a total budget of $120,000 raised on GoFundMe. Heralded as the most important win for labor since the 1930s, our documentary captures the ALU’s historic grassroots campaign to unionize thousands of their co-workers from day one of organizing.
Described by ALU President Christian Smalls as the “N.W.A. of the organizing world,” the group’s persona and strategies are highly unconventional: from wearing Money Heist costumes at press conferences to distributing free marijuana to workers. A core emotional arc arises out of the journey of our worker-turned-organizers through a series of political battles, pivotal strategic events, and interpersonal tensions that test their commitments and their solidarity. Up against a corporate superpower and with legal protections at a drastic low for workers, all odds are against the ALU. Yet our protagonists remain unswayed in their beliefs in collective action and the dignity and power of the working-class.
Closing Feature
Saturday, Nov 16, 2024
7:00 PM
BRIC
Run Time:
1 hr 44 mins
About the Filmmaker
Stephen Maing is an Emmy-award winning filmmaker based in New York. His feature documentary Crime + Punishment, which he directed, filmed and edited, won a Special Jury Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, an Emmy Award for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. His previous films, High Tech, Low Life, which he directed, filmed and edited over five years, and The Surrender, have screened internationally and were released on P.O.V. and Field of Vision, respectively. Maing is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, Sundance Institute Fellow, NBC Original Voices Fellow, John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Reporting Fellow and a recipient of the IDA's prestigious Courage Under Fire Award shared with the whistleblowers of the NYPD12. He is a frequent visiting artist and educator based in Ridgewood, Queens.
Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker and writer based in Toronto. Her films have screened in theatres and festivals internationally, including at CPH-DOX, SXSW, True/False, and Sheffield Doc/Fest. She is the director of the award-winning films The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) and The Hottest August (2019), and author of the book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America. The Hottest August was a New York Times Critics’ Pick and was called one of the ten best documentary films of 2019 by over a dozen publications, including Variety, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Brett has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Sundance Institute, and was named one of Variety's 10 Documentary Filmmakers to Watch. In 2020 she was nominated for a Cinema Eye Award for Best Director. She holds a PhD in geography and is currently an assistant professor of Media Praxis at the University of Toronto.
