Films That Changed the World

Marker and Marret filmed interviews with workers and trade unionists at the Rhodiacéta textile factory in Besançon in December 1967, nine months after the major strike that led to the factory’s takeover. This retrospective account of the workers’ awakening during the strike and their discovery of a common voice is framed by the present, in which management is halving bonuses and making staff redundant. Part of the film was created from footage shot by the workers themselves on 8mm cameras. The unhurried conversation is complemented by a visual study of the faces and gestures of these courageous young men, snippets from the strike, and sparse narration by the filmmakers. The film is permeated by solidarity and the opportunity for self-expression, which was transformed into a replicable organisational model after the work was released.During a discussion with the workers that followed the screening in Besançon, criticism was voiced: it was claimed that the portrayal was dominated by complaints rather than the articulation of a concrete programme, and that it neglected the work of women and the trade union activities preceding the strike. The filmmakers’ response was that militant cinema can only emerge from collaboration with worker-filmmakers. The creators trained twenty of them, giving rise to the Medvedkin groups, which by 1974 had made a dozen films set in their own working environments. In their hands, cinema became a tool for self-liberation.

In 1973, 180 miners from the Brookside mine in south-eastern Kentucky switched from a union that was loyal to the company to the national miners’ union. The mining company, which was part of the Duke Power group, subsequently refused to sign a contract with them. During the thirteen-month strike, the director accompanies them to picket lines, trade union meetings, court hearings and medical examinations of their dust-filled lungs. In her collective portrait of the strikers, it is the political voices of the miners’ wives and daughters that resonate most strongly. The protest song Which Side Are You On? runs through the film. Its author, Florence Reece, the widow of a miners’ trade unionist, comes to sing it to the strikers herself – forty years after composing it a few valleys away during strikes that lent the county its nickname “Bloody Harlan”. Even while filming, Barbara Kopple sought to change reality: she used the power of the camera to gather information, which she passed on to curb the brutality of the strike’s suppression; the raw footage served as a catalyst for further organising and the negotiation of a collective agreement. She then viewed the resulting film as a tool for organising. During negotiations over distribution, she insisted that workers be allowed to screen it free of charge. Fifty years after it was made, a restored copy returned to cinemas, and screenings are accompanied by discussions with trade unionists. The film has also become an educational resource for understanding labour disputes and trade union organising.

This compelling film about seasonal workers was produced as part of the CBS Reports series after nine months of on-location filming. It follows the annual migration from Florida along the East Coast to New York State. It not only examines the health, education, and housing conditions of these workers’ families, but also gives voice to their dreams and visions for the future. It interweaves empathetic interviews with statements from employers and politicians, all framed by the reporter’s voiceover. Edward R. Murrow speaks directly to the audience, who are spending the remnants of their Thanksgiving feast in front of the television: “The people you have seen have the strength to harvest your fruits and vegetables. They do not have the strength to influence the laws. Perhaps we do.”The film sparked a nationwide debate that accelerated the passage of legislation regarding agricultural labour. Twenty-two months after the film aired, President Kennedy signed the Migrant Health Act, which enabled federal funding for a network of clinics and health care for the families of migrant workers. In 1964, a registration requirement for labour brokers was established, and in 1967, some agricultural workers became eligible for the minimum wage for the first time. To this day, they are not entitled to overtime pay under federal law.

For infants and toddlers, safety, a full stomach, and good health care are not enough: they also need love. The film illustrates the central argument of the book Psychological Deprivation in Childhood (1963) by J. Langmeier and Z. Matějček, as well as the research of physician M. Damborská, through an extensive comparison. Emotional deprivation in a thousand forms – in infant care facilities and children’s homes, at daycare centres, and during long days at preschool – stands in contrast to happier situations, such as those with a mother who emerges from the kitchen at the slightest commotion. The patient camera and Matějček’s questions examine these deprived children and present their image for consideration by the “rulers.” The film Children Without Love stems from the professional and political shift at the time toward the family, which gradually eroded the socialist belief in the benefits of state-established and professionally managed institutional care for children. Maternity leave, which in 1963 lasted eighteen weeks, was subsequently extended to 26 weeks over the course of five years and supplemented by a new option to stay home with the child until the child’s first birthday. The period of the film’s public screenings and the discussions it sparked coincided with the phasing-out of weekly daycare centres and the regulation of night work for pregnant women and mothers of children under one year of age. The danger of emotional deprivation among children was also cited as a reason for the post-November dissolution of state-run daycare centres, the consequences of which we continue to grapple with to this day.

The story of the ships that never set sail is the story of a war that never began. After Japan’s surrender, the Netherlands prepares to return to its colony, but the Indonesians declare independence. Ivens lets the power of their voices resonate on Australian soil, to which the colonial government has relocated. A compilation of black-and-white footage from exile celebrations, political rallies, and events at the docks – interspersed with a minimalist graphic depiction of three centuries of colonization – traces how a boycott of Dutch ships carrying ammunition, intended to suppress the Indonesian struggle for independence, spreads among Australian dockworkers and Indian, Malay, and Chinese sailors. Staged reenactments of key events are performed by the protagonists themselves.As film commissioner for the Dutch East Indies, Ivens was supposed to document the planned return of the Dutch to the colony, but he soon switched sides to support the Indonesian revolution. The film, which he shot secretly with the support of Australian labour unions, bolstered the independence movement among Indonesians in Australia and on besieged Java, where it was smuggled in despite the Dutch blockade. As a testament to Australian solidarity and working-class support, the film paved the way for Australia to assume the role of mediator, a duty entrusted to it by the Indonesians during the 1949 negotiations on the transfer of sovereignty.

A cinematic essay on human geography – this is how the opening title describes the evocative stream of raw images from the remote region of Las Hurdes in western Spain. A feverish torrent of scenes of desolation and misery is accompanied by a relentless voiceover and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. This consistently unromanticized glimpse into the European wilderness bears witness to people in whose lives Buñuel’s crew finds not a single moment of happiness. As a spectacle of cruelty – albeit partly staged for the camera – it subverts the genre of the ethnographic travelogue while laying bare one of the dark hearts of our own continent.The film was accompanied by a series of bans, censorship interventions, and re-edits. The opening shot places Las Hurdes on the map of Europe and also highlights other pockets of poverty, including in Czechoslovakia. After its Madrid premiere in 1933, the film was banned in Spain, and in 1938, French censors cut the shot of the European map from it. However, it was not only countries concerned about their image that spoke out, but also those who had been advocating for reform in the region since the 1920s, as well as the people of Las Hurdes themselves. Faced with the threat of international embarrassment, the Spanish government increased its investment in the construction of roads and healthcare facilities in the region.

The first independently produced instalment of Tsuchimoto’s chronicle, which is set in the area around Minamata Bay in the Shiranui Sea, expresses both admiration and humility towards those whose lives have been marred by often-fatal mercury poisoning. Black-and-white close-ups of the faces and gestures of those affected – whether those afflicted by Minamata disease or their caring relatives – are accompanied almost exclusively by their own accounts. At other times, they remain silent, and the depth of field, close-ups and lighting heighten our sensitivity to physicality, the inhabited space and its texture. Tsuchimoto employs this language both aesthetically and ethically, revealing how he reflects on his position in relation to the individuals he films.During the five-month shoot in 1970, Minamata disease had not only been scientifically documented – the region had been living with it for almost fifteen years. However, neither an admission of guilt nor an appropriate response from the state had materialised, and the residents distrusted the media. Tsuchimoto’s film crew became part of the community, screening the footage they had shot every evening in the home of one of the victims. In doing so, he gave them back the voice that the media had denied them. The film captures the birth of the “one-share movement”, through which the sick and their bereaved families secured entry to the general meeting of the Chisso chemical plant. The court ruling of March 1973, which found the company liable, was the result of this movement, which subsequently inspired the spread of this practice to other countries as a means of strengthening the position of people directly affected by industrial production. Images: "Minamata: The Victims and Their World" © 71 Higashi Production / Photo: Takeshi SHIODA

On her journey into the depths of pornography, Bonnie Sherr Klein chooses the burlesque performer Lindalee Tracey as her companion. Tracey represents the opposite pole: the freedom and joy of publicly performed eroticism within an industry produced for men and run by men. Woven through a compilation of interviews with sex workers, club owners and feminist writers is the story of Tracey’s transformation: following a photo shoot for Hustler, arranged for her by the film crew, she describes the impact that manipulative desire has on her own body. The sexual explicitness of the scenes is matched by the explicitness of the arguments. The idea that the sex trade touches upon the deep-seated mechanisms of desire in both the individual and society resonates with the lines by Margaret Atwood, which she reads herself in the film: “…flesh made inert, the surge of your own uneasy power.”* Two Canadian provinces refused to allow the film into cinemas. A dispute with Ontario’s censors, which also concerned other films, ultimately led to a court ruling that weakened censorship. Despite the ban, Not a Love Story became one of the most talked-about documentaries produced by the National Film Board. Its reception was shaped by the escalating “porn wars”, which divided the second wave of feminism into anti-pornography and anti-censorship factions. In 1985, the Special Committee on Pornography and Prostitution recommended that regulations should be based not on obscenity and morality, but on dignity and equality. This was followed by a regulation requiring the mandatory display of an age “rating” on distributed films.

This participatory documentary, which Panh described as a space for dialogue, brings together eleven of the 1,720 staff members of S21 prison and two of the 12,000 prisoners, the vast majority of whom were tortured. It explores the sites where torture took place, scrutinising the prison guards’ meticulously kept records, registration photographs and the paintings created after 1979 by the imprisoned Vann Nath. He survived thanks to the portraits of Pol Pot that he produced under the supervision of a commander nicknamed “Duch” in a workshop within earshot of the torture chambers. The film’s focus remains on the perpetrators. It has them re-enact the once-routine acts of everyday cruelty and seeks to understand how they became cogs in the murderous machinery.The film was made almost a quarter of a century after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, under whose rule some two million people perished, and five years after the death of Pol Pot, who never stood trial in a proper court of law. The film succeeded in documenting the crimes – a body of evidence that lawyers continued to use for many years – and in securing specific confessions and accounts of torture and violence from several perpetrators. At the time of filming, Cambodia passed the law establishing a special tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge in 2001. Commander Duch became the first defendant and was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment. During a court-ordered reconstruction at the crime scene, some of those featured in the film re-enacted their movements before the judges. The footage was directly incorporated into the investigation: during the re-enactment, Duch was also confronted with unused footage and testimonies from S21. No other former S21 staff members were prosecuted. In 2003, the international Khmer Rouge Tribunal was established under the auspices of the UN.

Esteticky formativní film rozebírá vraždu dallaského policisty z roku 1976 a odhaluje mechanismus justičního selhání. Prostřednictvím důsledně strukturovaných rozhovorů, detailního rozboru policejních a soudních materiálů a s doprovodem minimalistické hudby Philipa Glasse buduje protichůdné verze jediné noci, přičemž rekonstrukci nepoužívá jako ilustraci, ale jako analytický nástroj: tytéž momenty se vrací v různých variantách, čímž odhaluje nestabilitu paměti i svědectví. Pracuje s noirovou stylizací, pomalými detaily, záblesky a prázdnými prostory pomocí montáže, která neskládá lineární kriminální příběh, ale síť rozporů. Tím ukazuje, že k odsouzení došlo na základě manipulací, nespolehlivých výpovědí a institucionálního tlaku na rychlé uzavření případu. Film redefinoval možnosti investigativního dokumentu a stal se referenčním dílem debat o justičních omylech, věrohodnosti obrazu a moci audiovizuálních důkazů.Téměř zapomenutý případ Randalla Dalea Adamse se díky filmu proměnil v celonárodní kauzu a zásadně ovlivnil její právní vývoj. Zjištění získaná během natáčení zpochybnila svědecké výpovědi i konstrukci obžaloby, přispěla k obnovení řízení a zvýšila veřejný tlak na přezkum rozsudku. V březnu 1989 texaský odvolací soud Adamsovo odsouzení zrušil a po dvanácti letech vězení byl propuštěn.

The seven-part film series Sanrizuka, named after an area near Tokyo, was filmed by the Ogawa Pro collective between 1968 and 1977. This third instalment focuses on the resistance of farming families against the third compulsory acquisition of their land for the construction of an airport. The film crew captures the scuffles with the police in the thick of the jostling crowd, observing the farmers’ outbursts of anger and pain from an intimate vantage point. Tense moments of struggle alternate with calmer passages, in which the camera is drawn to the billowing smoke rising from the bonfires lit on the barricades.The individual episodes of the 12-hour series documented the expropriation of land in the area of what is now Narita International Airport from the perspective of both the local residents and the student movement, which had travelled there to support the resistance. The collective adapted their filming equipment to withstand rough handling amidst the clashes. The third instalment of the series was shot in just three days and was soon released as a “ciné-tract” – an urgent counter-narrative refuting the claims put forward by the authorities that the land expropriation had been successful. As part of Ogawa’s distribution strategy, the films were screened outside cinemas, in venues close to the local population, thereby enabling the collective to effectively mobilise them to actively support the movement.

Wiseman’s debut establishes his rigorously observational method and his interest in the inner workings of institutions. It takes place at Bridgewater State Hospital, a correctional facility for mentally ill offenders, which he quietly observes without commentary, music, or dialogue. A close-up camera captures their daily lives: alongside a guard, it peers at them through a peephole amid the bare walls of the cells; it is in close proximity to naked bodies subjected to routine violence; it records their humiliation as well as the thoughtless, even sadistic work of a doctor smoking a cigarette. Scenes of force-feeding via a tube are intercut with the postmortem examination of the same body. The film begins and ends with the variety show from which it takes its name. In these scenes, it is impossible to distinguish the inmates from the guards.The state of Massachusetts attempted to prevent the film’s premiere, and in January 1968, a court ordered the destruction of the negative. The ban was eased a year later, but screenings remained restricted to professionals until 1991. The film was then shown to employees of psychiatric facilities as an example of unacceptable treatment. However, changes in educational practices led only to incremental changes in psychiatric care, where systemic reform did not occur until much later. Although the court noted certain improvements in conditions that occurred after the film’s completion, Bridgewater remains under the control of the prison administration to this day, and according to a 2026 report by the Disability Law Center, involuntary medication, restraint, and isolation continue to be used there to an alarming extent and in violation of the law.

A black-and-white record of the final week of the August 1980 strike at the Gdańsk shipyard for better working and social conditions – a strike which soon escalated into a broader political protest against the communist regime in Poland – is introduced by the following caption: “To remain faithful to the truth in the film, recordings have been included which, for technical reasons, are not accompanied by footage.” This acknowledgement of the gaps draws attention to the sound, which was heard live by thousands of workers on the site at the time of filming. The rally is thus present in the film despite the camera remaining fixed on the conference table where the strike committee, led by Lech Wałęsa, sits opposite the government commission. Ten years after the suppression of December ’70, the demand in the secondary title of the censorship-truncated documentary Workers '71 is fulfilled here: Nothing About Us Without Us. The third of the twenty-one August demands, which the inter-company strike committee presented to the government, called for freedom of speech. Despite protests from the film community, however, the film itself was denied this: the censors did not approve it for general distribution, though they did permit screenings for the purposes of Solidarity. The trade unions hired cinema auditoriums, although the film’s title was not listed in the programmes. Yet by 1981, before the state of emergency silenced the unions, over 4.7 million people had seen the film. According to documentary filmmaker Marcel Łoziński, the film gave them “a sense of immense strength” in the struggle against the communist regime.