Union

Synopsis

On April 1, 2022 a group of ordinary workers made history when they did what everyone thought was impossible: they successfully won their election to become the very first unionized Amazon workplace in America. This feat would be extraordinary for any union, let alone the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), who did it with no prior organizing experience, no institutional backing, and a total budget of $120,000 raised on GoFundMe. Heralded as the most important win for labor since the 1930s, this highly cinematic documentary captures the ALU’s historic grassroots campaign to unionize thousands of their co-workers from day one of organizing.

Director Biography

Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker and writer based in Toronto. Her films have screened in theatres and festivals internationally, including at CPH-DOX, SXSW, True/False, and Sheffield Doc/Fest. She is the director of the award-winning films The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) and The Hottest August (2019), and author of the book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America. The Hottest August was a New York Times Critics’ Pick and was called one of the ten best documentary films of 2019 by over a dozen publications, including Variety, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair.

Stephen Maing’s feature documentary Crime + Punishment won a Special Jury Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and an Emmy Award, and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. He has held fellowships from United States Artists and Sundance Institute and was a recipient of the IDA’s prestigious Courage Under Fire Award.