San Francisco Frontiers - Workers, migrants focus of documentaries by Oscar winners at Venice

"Union Town," which debuts Wednesday at the festival, is the third in a trilogy about worker struggles by the Oscar-winning US director, following 1976's "Harlan County U.S.A." and 1990's "American Dream."

"People are still fighting for the right to have a union, the union of their choice, the right to have a decent pay, the right to work in a safe place and to be respected," the director, 80, told AFP Tuesday.

"And that has never changed. That's what they're fighting for now."

Kopple's latest film centres on New York City union efforts to pressure multinational giants from UPS to Amazon for better wages and benefits for their employees and part-time workers.

"We shouldn't have to fight them. They have the money," a leader from the Teamsters union says about UPS in the film.

"But they just choose not to."

- Delivery riders' perils -

The documentary also follows the labour movement's latest underdogs -- riders for delivery apps like GrubHub and DoorDash -- who remain largely invisible.

Hot warehouses and delivery trucks, heavy lifting, and no time off for family issues are some of the complaints voiced by workers at UPS and Amazon. For riders, dangers encountered on the street range from muggings to hit-and-runs -- some of them fatal.

One GrubHub rider from Bangladesh describes how he was hit by a car during a delivery, which landed him in the hospital for two days. The company deactivated his account.

"If they get hit by a car, they go to the hospital, they have to pay. They have to buy their clothes, their bikes, everything. And I didn't want them to be silent. I didn't want them to be invisible," Kopple said.

In Venice with Kopple was Antonio Rosario, a Teamster for 31 years seen throughout the film trying to educate often fearful or reluctant workers about their rights. He called labour law in America today "like the wild, wild West".

"People are tired of being treated without dignity, without respect. And these companies are making an obscene amount of money," he said at a press conference Wednesday, before breaking down in tears.

"People are tired of these trillionaires and billionaires making all this money and not sharing that wealth with the working people that make it for them."

- Crackdown -

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) deployment to Minneapolis in January is the subject of another documentary screening at Venice: "They're Here" by Oscar-winning Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller.

Besides showing residents' grassroots efforts, such as sophisticated tracking systems to locate ICE teams, it was essential that the 25-minute film also include the "immigrant perspective", Mueller said.

"The immigrant community was in hiding, staying at home, fearing for their safety, fearing for the separation of their families," she told a press conference.

One fearful migrant worker in the film chose to hide in the trunk of his car in order to get to work, driven by his son through the city's ICE-filled streets.

The filmmakers were "pretty blown away that this is the United States, that somebody is just trying to go to their job, and this is the kind of situation that he is being put into," Mueller said.

The film will be released in the United States ahead of the US midterm elections, Poitras said.

Poitras won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2022 for her documentary "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed", which dealt with the US opioid crisis.

L.Ramos--SFF