Steve Zeltzer
Labour film and video activists are assembling the first international working class film and video festival to be held in Turkey. The festival will include labour films from around the world, including Venezuela, Korea, Iran, Japan, Bolivia, Argentina, France and Palestine.
The organising committee has captioned many films and plans to make arrangements for them to be available for workers throughout Turkey. The Turkish film workers' union as well as many other trade unions have expressed their support.
The festival, which starts on April 29 in Istanbul, will also include a commemoration of the massacre and murder of 37 trade unionists in Turkey in 1977, music and cultural celebrations and discussions on the use of labour film and video and how workers and the labour movement in Turkey can do more of their own work. The festival will also be screening films in Ankara.
The Laborfest movement began in San Francisco in 1994 and has spread out to Japan, Korea, Argentina and Bolivia. It has provided an important institutional impetus for annual programming on the global struggles of workers. The network is seeking to have similar events in every city of the world and at a recent labour communication conference in South Africa, trade unionists from many African countries discussed how they could develop similar festivals. The need to provide labour education on workers' history, culture and struggle through film and video received a positive response.
Recently, the first African Labour Film and Video Festival was presented in Capetown to a meeting of more than 275 trade unionists. The debate after the film The Take — about worker occupations in Argentina — was dramatic. Trade unionists discussed how they could take the same action in the Capetown area to stop the massive closures and privatisations taking place in the clothing industry. They also criticised the African National Congress government for implementing a privatisation program in line with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and were heartened that in Argentina, workers were taking the factories into their own hands.
[Trade unionists, film makers and labour activists are invited to attend the festival in Turkey and can contact the organisers at <laborfest@sendika.org>. For more information, visit <http://www.laborfest.sendika.org/english.shtml>.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 26, 2006.
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