Thursday, October 16
The Ship Breakers (2004)

Welcome to Alang, India, the site of a gargantuan scrap yard where oceangoing ships come to die. Forty thousand Indians live and work here, dismembering and scavenging the hulks of 400 vessels every year. The film chronicles the lives of the people who live here, from the men who take apart these giant ships with their bare hands to the bosses, who ignore environmental and health concerns for fear of losing the business to other developing nations. One worker a day, on average, dies on the job, evaporated in explosions, crushed by falling steel, cut in half by cables or broken up by falls. Of the remainder, one in four will contract cancers caused by asbestos, PCBs and other toxic substances. Vividly capturing both the haunting beauty of the ships and the deplorable conditions of the workers,Shipbreakers is an international story of greed, survival, Third World labor, and environmental neglect.
(42 minutes)

Ghosts (2005)

This film is the first of five segments of a documentary entitled "Workinman's Death". The section "Ghosts" evokes the Herculean labors of Alexsei Stakhanov, a legendary coal miner in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930's who was mythicized for his superhuman productivity and is remembered at the beginning of the film. Jumping to the present, "Ghosts" visits Stakhanov's latter-day descendants extracting what coal remains in the Donbass region of Ukraine, where he toiled 70 years earlier. Squeezing their bodies into narrow crevices known as mousetraps, many no higher than 16 inches, the miners use chisels and pickaxes to dig coal out of these depleted mines. After separating coal from rock, they haul their meager spoils out of the pit by hand in small wagons, and divide it up. Most use it to heat their homes. The little bit left over is sold for food. Without the coal, one declares, they would freeze to death. (31 minutes)

Thursday, December 4
War Dance (2008)

Set in war-ravaged Northern Uganda, this film is the real-life story about a group of children whose love of music brings joy, excitement and hope back into their poverty-stricken lives. Three children who have suffered horrific brutalities momentarily forget their struggles as they participate in music, song and dance at their school. Invited to compete in a prestigious music festival in their nation's capital, their historic journey is a stirring tale about the power of the human spirit to triumph against tremendous odds (107 minutes)