The Hottest August

Up against one of the most powerful companies on the planet, a group of Amazon workers embark on an unprecedented campaign to unionize their warehouse in Staten Island, New York.

In the spring of 2008, car wash workers throughout Los Angeles formed the Carwash Workers Organizing Committee of the United Steelworkers (USW), a precursor to eventual plans to unionize the informal workers of a multi-million dollar industry rampant with exploitation. Most of these workers are undocumented migrants from Central America whose aspirations have led them to washing cars in the city of angels. This experimental documentary, shot on Super 8 film, journeys into a city defined by as much by cars as it is immigrant labor to offer a quiet commentary on the relationship between class, place, and work.

More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself has never felt further away or more out of sight. This is a film about the prison in which we never see an actual penitentiary. The film unfolds a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives, from an anti-sex-offender pocket park in Los Angeles, to a congregation of ex-incarcerated chess players shut out of the formal labor market, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs.

An exploration into the first days of the strike at two Amazon warehouses in New York City.

Formerly incarcerated people reassemble their lives at The Castle, a singular housing facility and a supportive home base created by The Fortune Society.

SANCTUARY follows Coloradans on multiple sides of a controversial issue as the Extreme Risk Protection Orders bill comes into law. As these individuals address the threats, real and imagined, that the law responds to or poses, it uncovers the meaning of safety in America today.

For nearly a decade, Amazon has recruited thousands of RVers for a seasonal labor unit called CamperForce. Adapted from the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Six rural American communities are marked as candidates for an unthinkable fate: their land, a burial ground for 77,000 tons of nuclear waste. Against the impassive logic of government analysis and archives, a people’s history of resistance and stewardship emerges through a visceral journey across the landscapes, ecologies, and personal histories of the candidate sites.

David Harvey discusses the spatial aspects of capital, his work in the US, and the development of Hudson Yards.

In St. Louis County, the home of police-shooting victim Michael Brown, a practice with a long history has become systematic: the operation of modern-day debtors’ prisons. A Debtors' Prison follows two plaintiffs in an unfolding court case, Samantha Jenkins and Meredith Walker, as they describe the matrix of controls that subjected them to incarceration for being poor.

A portrait of work, landscape and community in an era of globalization. In the rich fabric of Sarnia, Ontario's landscape— the bright sprawl of petrochemical plants, swollen hospital wards and crowded bars— one finds a microcosm of the 21st century. Tattooed men serving fries, basement musicians, boilermakers and volunteer firemen, heartbroken widows and an optimistic mayor - the lives of a diverse medley of characters intersect to reveal the dramas and contradictions of an industrial town out of sync with a post-industrial world. As the dystopian architecture of the petrochemical plants, squatted like crushed space stations just meters away from homes and schoolyards, give way to the spaces that make this city a community, we begin to see what it is that everyone seems so afraid to lose. Land of Destiny is a tender portrait of a working-class city in paralysis and a devastating investigation into when and for what people fight for.

Billowing smoke pours from a bus, as a fire crew attempts to douse the flames. Long, aching lines of motionless vehicles sit at one of Israel’s hated checkpoints. Two men habitually pray on the road alongside their stopped car. A lone helicopter hovers overhead, reinforcing the reality of perpetual occupation. Roads Through Palestine is a cinematic portrait of life in the West Bank, and an intimate reflection on the geography of war. Directed by Brett Story with music by Stefan Christoff.

World in a City is a portrait of Toronto and the steps Torontonians are taking to create a society that welcomes and encourages new immigrants to flourish

In this feature documentary, 6 student activists visit 36 Canadian towns to take on one giant corporation. Filmed over 2 summers, these young crusaders (plus a gonzo journalist) try to raise public awareness about Wal-Mart's business practices and their effect on cities and towns across Canada. With youthful passion and often hilarious cultural jams, this film takes us to the frontlines of the ongoing debate over the company's increasing dominance in the Canadian retail market.