American Dream (film)
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| American Dream | |
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 DVD Cover |
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| Directed by | Barbara Kopple Co-directors: Cathy Caplan Thomas Haneke Lawrence Silk |
| Produced by | Arthur Cohn Barbara Kopple |
| Music by | Michael Small |
| Cinematography | Tom Hurwitz Mathieu Roberts Nesya Shapiro |
| Editing by | Cathy Caplan Thomas Haneke Lawrence Silk |
| Distributed by | Channel 4 Films Cabin Creek |
| Release date(s) | October 6, 1990 (New York Film Festival) |
| Running time | 98 minutes |
| Country | United States United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
American Dream is an Academy Award winning documentary film directed by Barbara Kopple and co-directed by Cathy Caplan, Thomas Haneke, and Lawrence Silk.[1]
The picture was partly funded by actor Edward Asner, director John Sayles, and the public-service British television station Channel Four Films.
This cinéma vérité documentary recounts an unsuccessful wildcat strike in the heartland of America against Hormel Foods.
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[edit] Synopsis
The film is centered on union meatpacking workers at Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota between 1985 and 1986. Hormel cut the hourly wage from $10.69 to $8.25 after posting a net profit of $30 million. In addition other benefits would be cut by 30 percent. The local union (P-9) opposed the cut, but the United Food and Commercial Workers Union did not support them.
The local union, hires a free-lance strike consultant named Ray Rogers, who comes in with charts, graphs and promises of national press attention. Rogers does deliver, in the short-run, but at the cost of denying the local the experienced negotiating skills that the international would have supplied.
American Dream features footage of union meetings and press releases, Hormel press releases, news broadcasts, and in-depth interviews with people on both sides of the issue.
[edit] Exhibition
The film premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 6, 1990. On January 1991 it was screened at the Sundance Film Festival.
On March 18, 2002, it opened in New York City.
[edit] Background
The film took five years to complete. In an interview director/producer explained why she once again took on the topic of unions and strikes after her successful award winning Harlan County, USA. She said: "In Harlan County, there was such a strong union movement. It seemed that people really cared about workers' struggles and what happened to workers. When I was reading and trying to figure out why plants were closing and why there could be so many wage concessions, it seemed the natural thing to go and explore in the mid-to-late eighties what was happening in America, and how things had changed from the late seventies."[2]
[edit] Critical reception
The film was well received by film critics.
Critic Roger Ebert liked the documentary and its message. He wrote, "This is the kind of movie you watch with horrified fascination, as families lose their incomes and homes, management plays macho hardball, and rights and wrongs grow hopelessly tangled...The people in this film are so real they make most movie characters look like inhabitants of the funny page."[3]
The Austin Chronicle's film critic Marjorie Baumgarten also appreciated the film. She wrote, "Kopple's Academy Award-winning documentary American Dream exposes the human cost of Reaganomics...What American Dream wants to learn is: how did this human tragedy happen -- at Hormel of all places, a company with a reputation for progressivism? Decades ago it was among the first to furnish its workers with guaranteed annual wages and profit-sharing plans. Generations of family members worked at the plant, taking pride in their products and their relationship to the manufacturing process. The answer the movie presents is Reaganomics, the 'as long as I've got mine, the hell with everyone else' attitude prevalent in the 1980s."[4]
[edit] Interviews
- Jesse Jackson as himself
- Ray Rogers as himself
[edit] Awards
Wins
- Academy Awards: Oscar; Best Documentary, Barbara Kopple and Arthur Cohn; 1991.
- International Documentary Association: IDA Award; Barbara Kopple; 1991.
- Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards: LAFCA Award; Best Documentary; 1991.
- Sundance Film Festival: Audience Award Documentary; Filmmakers Trophy Documentary; Grand Jury Prize Documentary; all for Barbara Kopple; 1991.
- Directors Guild of America: DGA Award; Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary/Actuality; Barbara Kopple; 1992.
- National Society of Film Critics Awards: NSFC Award; Best Documentary; 1993.
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ American Dream at the Internet Movie Database.
- ^ Hall, John. Latent Immage, interview with Barbara Kopple.
- ^ Ebert, Roger. Chicago Sun-Times, film review, April 3, 1992.
- ^ Baumgarten, Marjorie. The Austin Chronicle, film review, May 15, 1992.
[edit] External links
| Preceded by Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt |
Academy Award for Documentary Feature 1990 |
Succeeded by In the Shadow of the Stars |
