Union Maids. 1976. USA. Directed by Julia Reichert, Jim Klein, Miles Mogulescu. DCP. 48 min.
I Am Somebody. 1970. USA. Directed by Madeline Anderson. With Andrew Young, Charles Abernathy, Coretta Scott King. DCP courtesy Icarus Films. 30 min.
Since its inception, the Flaherty has celebrated nonfiction film's power to be a catalyst for social change, making work about the antiwar and antinuclear movements, racial justice, gender equity, labor, and media literacy core to its program. This screening pairs two essential documents, by trailblazing female directors, of the struggle for labor rights.
I Am Somebody is an urgent, intimate chronicle of the 1969 Charleston nurses’ strike, which lasted 100 days and brought civil rights leaders to the front lines. “I looked at these women like they were my sisters,” Madeline Anderson has reflected,” because I’d had the same experience of gender, race, and politics that they were having.” Anderson became the first Black woman to enter the film editor’s union; I Am Somebody was produced by Local 1199, New York’s Drug and Hospital Union, and was screened at the 1970 Flaherty seminar, organized by MoMA curator Adrienne Mancia.
Union Maids, which garnered Julia Reichert and her collaborators an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature, looks to a preceding era in American labor history: the fight to form industrial unions in the 1930s. Told through the eyes of three remarkable women working in Chicago factories, the film interweaves oral histories of early union meetings, the days of sit-down strikes, organizing the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the stockyards, and facing police shotguns to fight the evictions of unemployed workers.