La gueule de l'emploi

A documentary about the closure of General Motors' plant at Flint, Michigan, which resulted in the loss of 30,000 jobs. Details the attempts of filmmaker Michael Moore to get an interview with GM CEO Roger Smith.

Bill Moyers tells the story of several hardworking Milwaukee families struggling with low-paying jobs after previous employers downsized their operations. Filmed over a period of five years, these families were first featured in Moyers’s 1992 documentary ‘Minimum Wages: The New Economy.’ FRONTLINE chronicles the families’ emotional and financial strains, their search for better jobs and job retraining, and looks at Milwaukee’s efforts to adapt to an ever-shrinking industrial sector.

Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.

With the energy of the dying, those in power apply themselves to reasserting the value of work – with force, if need be. But more and more workers have understood that, to truly value their work, they have to do without it. They also have to get rid of the society of consumption that goes along with it. It may not be easy, but it is certainly amusing. We present a panorama of a mass desertion destined to spread.

One of the dominating figures in Elvis Presley's life was his manager, who was known as the "Colonel". No other relationship in Elvis' life was as controversial and misunderstood as the one he had with Colonel Tom Parker. The truth about their unique friendship is revealed in this documentary.

Following four Lakota families over three years, Homeland explores what it takes for the Lakota community to build a better future in the face of tribal and government corruption, scarce housing, unemployment, and alcoholism. Intimate interviews with a spiritual leader, a grandmother, an artist, and a community activist from South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation reveal how each survives through family ties, cultural tradition, humor, and a palpable yearning for self-reliance and personal freedom.

Images and numbers illustrate the domestic political measures taken after the Nazis came to power to eliminate unemployment.

The Idle Ones is a profile of contemporary affairs - somewhere on the edge of Europe - in a place where unemployment for some young people is fast becoming a way of life. Covering a period of 18 months, the film follows the activities of a group of young men in their 20s who have finished their schooling and stayed in their home village - they loaf about unemployed since they can´t find any work in the remote district. The main characters are more or less idle young fellows whose stories link together and make up the film. Tinged with humour, The Idle Ones is a story about frustrated but vital young people in a period of transition, waiting for something to happen. For some, the waiting is becoming their life.

Once upon a time there was a large Finnish company called Nokia that manufactured the world’s best and most innovative mobile phones. Nokia’s annual budget was larger than that of the Government of Finland and their phones spread everywhere and changed the whole culture of communication. But then something changed. Film portrays the rise and fall of Nokia and the Finnish mobile phone industry. Nokia engineers, designers and managers tell their story about the creation, success and downfall of the Finnish mobile phone.