Keep Up the Good Work

It is a fetish, a mantra, a secret religion to modern man: work. In times of the financial crisis and massive job reductions, this documentary movie questions work as our 'hallow' sense in life in a way that both humors and pains us.

2013-05-02 | de

The Emotional Society On Stage

A dance, expressed with interviews of people with jobs such as a daycare teacher, call center employee and cashier. The film reveals reality of the controlled emotion behind the kind ‘smile’ of the jobs.

2015-05-01 | ko

La Meilleure Façon de tracer

2010-01-18 | fr

Exergo

Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists.

2024-05-04 | eu

Pride & Attitude

The viewpoints of women from a country that no longer exists preserved on low-band U-matic tape. GDR-FRG. Courageous, self-confident and emancipated: female industry workers talk about gaining autonomy.

2025-10-09 | de

Hécuba: un sueño de pasión

What we tend to identify with the acting profession has little to do with what is really this profession. Thirty-six Spanish actors reflect on their work and contrasted their experiences. As thread, the contrast between the voices of veterans and images of young theater students , for whom everything is still possible. Among the many actors are interviewed Javier Bardem, Antonio Banderas, Victoria Abril, Carmen Maura, Fernando Fernán Gómez, José Luis López Vázquez, José Coronado, Emma Suarez, Alberto San Juan, Ariadna Gil, Ana Belén, Pilar Lopez de Ayala and many other.

2006-10-27 | es

With These Hands: The Story of an American Furniture Factory

In 2007, unable to compete with cheaper offshore production, Hooker Furniture Co. closed its plant in Martinsville, Virginia, after 83 years in operation. With These Hands follows the last load of wood down the assembly line as it is cut, honed, and assembled into fine furniture. Along the way, employees at the factory share their perspectives on work, community, and survival in a country devastated by de-industrialization and outsourcing.

2009-04-25 | en

My Body

Oscar, not quite a child anymore, scavenges for scrap metal for his father. He spends his life in improvised landfills among what remains of leftovers. Worlds apart, yet close-by, there is Stanley. He tidies the church in exchange for a monetised hospitality, picks fruits, herds sheep: anything that keep his foreign body busy. Oscar, the young Sicilian, and Stanley the Nigerian don’t seem to have much in common. Except for the feeling of being thrown into the world, to suffer the same refusal, the same overwhelming wave of choices imposed on them by others.

2021-05-26 | it

Work Hard Play Hard

A film about non-territorial office space, multi-mobile knowledge workers, Blackberries and Miles&More. A road movie discovering the working world of tomorrow. This documentary will take you on a journey through the post-industrial knowledge and services workshops, our supposed future working place. In this new world work will be handled more liberally. Time clocks cease to exist. Attention is not compulsory any more. The resource “human“ comes into focus. The film closely follows the high-tech work force – people who are highly mobile and passionate to make their work their purpose in life. Further episodes resume this topic and lead into the world of modern office architecture and into the world of Human Resource Management.

2012-04-12 | de

EL SITE

Isaac, a failed actor and Skies employee, shows us the daily life of workers in an average call center, facing the boredom to get to the end of the work day.

2024-04-26 | es

Tiny Things

The life and work of a retired model maker.

2024-05-21 | hu

Collective Monologue

Intimate and fragmented moments unfold in a community of zoos and animal rescue centers across Argentina. As histories of these institutions are uncovered, dedicated workers commit both day and night to caring for the remaining enclosed animals, fostering a mutual bond that transcends imagined boundaries between human and animal.

2025-01-16 | es

The Happy Worker - Or How Work Was Sabotaged

Our premise is that work has become an act of self-sabotage. Empty corporate jargon, ever-changing management fashions and self-serving bureaucracy masquerading as efficiency hijacked the purpose of work. Creative documentary The Happy Worker will show how we got to this point and the very human behavior that led us here. We want to show how this unhealthy system is maintained and what keeps us from calling bullshit.

2022-05-04 | en

Clean

When illness forces her away from her beloved trauma cleaning business, Sandra Pankhurst faces up to her traumatic past and begins a search for her birth mother.

2022-09-15 | en

The Void Inside

After getting caught in a fight, Vahid needs to sell one of his kidneys to avoid a prison sentence of many years. While waiting for the liberating call from a buyer, a wish for a better life starts to grow within him.

2020-10-21 | en

Handbook of Movie Theaters’ History

Handbook of Movie Theaters’ History is a documentary about the history, the development in the present days and the future of movie theaters in the city of Turin, Italy. It mixes the documentary language with comedy and fiction, and is enriched by interviews to some of the most important voices of Turin cinematography. The film follows the evolution of movie theaters by enlightening its main milestones: the pre-cinema experiences in the late 19th Century, the colossals and the movie cathedrals of the silent era, the arthouse theaters, the National Museum of Cinema, the Torino Film Festival, the movie theaters system today and the main hypothesis about its future.

2019-11-29 | it

The End of the Endless

"Fim do Sem Fim" is a feature-length documentary that has as its backdrop the imminent disappearance of certain trades and professions in Brazil. Shot in 10 Brazilian states, the film is a dive into the inventiveness and resistance of men in the face of technological and cultural changes.

2001-04-16 | pt

Takumi: A 60,000 Hour Story on the Survival of Human Craft

There is a popular theory that it takes at least 10,000 hours of focused practice for a human to become expert in any field. In Japan, there are craftspeople who go far beyond this to reach a special kind of mastery. These people are called Takumi and they devote 60,000 hours to their craft. That's 8 hours a day, 240 days a year, for over 30 years. It's an almost superhuman level of dedication to a life of repetition and no shortcuts. This film asks the question: Will human craft disappear as artificial intelligence reaches beyond our limits?

2019-03-19 | en

Haus und Hof

Agricultural scientist and mother Isolde struggles with the dicrepancies between her personal convictions and the political realities in East Germany.

1980-12-05 | de

Musician

Common sense says you can't make a living in America playing avant-garde improvisational jazz. But Ken Vandermark does it anyway. Among musicians, Vandermark's work ethic is almost mythic. The Chicago reed player has released over 100 albums with nearly 40 ensembles, spends over eight months per year on the road, and lives every other waking moment composing, arranging, performing—and trying to discipline his two hyperactive canines. Though Vandermark was the recipient of a 1999 MacArthur genius grant, he still spends most of his life in smoky clubs and low-budget recording studios, hoping people will plunk down hard-earned cash to hear his wholly non-commercial music. Following the artful cinéma vérité style of the internationally acclaimed Sheriff (Work Series #1), Musician (Work Series #2) forgoes all interviews and voice-overs. It is a fly-on-the-wall time capsule that expertly captures every subtle sound and texture of this most American of art forms.

2007-05-19 | en