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Union

by Brett Story & Stephen Maing
An inside look at Amazon workers' efforts to unionize JFK8 Warehouse in Staten Island, despite the company's ongoing attempts to stop the growing labor movement.
2024  ·  1h44m  ·  United States
English
English subs
About the Film

Industry Passholder tickets are available online starting at 9:00 pm the night prior to the screening date, and up until one hour before the screening time. Passholders can also obtain tickets in person at the screening venue’s box office on the day of the screening upon presentation of their pass. Venue box offices open one hour prior to the venue’s first screening of the day.

When some workers make history by becoming the first unionized Amazon workplace in the United States, their victory stands as extraordinary for any union, let alone the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which succeeded with no prior organizing experience, institutional backing or substantial budget. These leaders, including the charismatic Chris Smalls, embraced their group’s unique persona and highly unconventional strategies, like wearing Money Heist costumes at press conferences or distributing free marijuana to workers, and did not back down in the face of near-impossible hurdles, including a dire lack of resources, interpersonal tensions, and the ruthless tactics of a corporate giant.

In this vérité documentation of their organizing, what emerges is a surprising turn of events led by an unwavering determination and a belief in labour-power. Heralded as the most important win for labour since the 1930s, ALU’s historic grassroots campaign demonstrates the profound ability of collective action to awaken the inherent power of the working class.

Upcoming Screenings

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About the Director

Stephen Maing

Stephen Maing is an Emmy-award winning filmmaker and cinematographer based in New York City. His most recent film UNION is an immersive cinéma vérité account of the historic efforts by workers to unionize the first Amazon fulfillment center. UNION was co-directed with Brett Story and won a Special Jury Award for The Art of Change at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. His feature documentary CRIME + PUNISHMENT which he directed, filmed and edited won a 2018 Sundance Special Jury Award, 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, directed, filmed and edited over five years, and THE SURRENDER, have screened internationally and were released on POV and Field of Vision, respectively. His film DIRTY GOLD, featured in Netflix’s Dirty Money series, immersively reveals US involvement in the illicit mining and trading of gold and was filmed on location in Peru’s Amazon rain forest & Miami, Florida.

 
Other films by Stephen Maing

Brett Story

Brett Story
Brett Story

Brett Story is a geographer and award-winning non-fiction filmmaker. Her films have screened at True/False, Oberhausen, Hot Docs, the Viennale, and Dok Leipzig, among other international festivals.  Her second feature-length film, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes  (2016) was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Canadian Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. Her interests across the fields of documentary and critical theory are expansive, and include experimental cinema and essay films, politics and aesthetics, racial capitalism and Marxist political economy, and visual geography. Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto and is the author of a forthcoming book titled Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America from the University of Minnesota Press. She was a 2016 Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow and is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.

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