union
Up against one of the most powerful companies on the planet, a group of Amazon workers embark on an unprecedented campaign to unionize their warehouse in Staten Island, New York.
“Astounding, rebellious… brilliant.”
SYNOPSIS
Through intimate cinema vérité, UNION chronicles the extraordinary efforts of an unlikely group of warehouse workers as they launch a grassroots union campaign at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York. Led by the charismatic but underestimated Chris Smalls, the diverse band of workers start the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) and embark on a journey against one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. The odds are stacked against them, as the group finds itself up against a tech industry giant with unlimited resources, without major support from national unions or politicians, and while navigating internal divisions within their own ranks. Filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing document the struggle from day one, offering a gripping human drama about the fight for power and dignity in today's globalized economic landscape.
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Creative Team
Stephen Maing
Stephen Maing is an Emmy-award winning filmmaker based in New York. His feature documentary CRIME + PUNISHMENT, which he directed, filmed and edited, won a Special Jury Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, an Emmy Award for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary. His previous films, HIGH TECH, LOW LIFE, which he directed, filmed and edited over five years, and THE SURRENDER, have screened internationally and were released on POV and Field of Vision, respectively.
Maing is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, Sundance Institute Fellow, NBC Original Voices Fellow, John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Reporting Fellow and a recipient of the IDA's prestigious Courage Under Fire Award shared with the whistleblowers of the NYPD12. He is a frequent visiting artist and educator based in Ridgewood, Queens.
Brett Story
Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker and writer whose work pushes the formal boundaries of political cinema. Her films have screened in theaters and festivals internationally, including at Sundance, CPH-DOX, and SXSW. She is the director of the feature films THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES (2016) and THE HOTTEST AUGUST (2019), and the author of the book PRISON LAND (2019). THE HOTTEST AUGUST was a New York Times Critics’ Pick and was called one of the best documentary films of 2019 by Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, among others.
Brett has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Sundance Institute, and was named one of Variety's 10 Documentary Filmmakers to Watch. In 2020 she was nominated for a Cinema Eye Award for Best Director. She holds a PhD in geography and is currently an assistant professor of Cinema at the University of Toronto.
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Mars Verrone
Mars Verrone is a filmmaker, musician, and educator from Los Angeles, CA, currently based in Brooklyn, NY. In 2022, Mars directed and produced award-winning short documentary GOLDEN VOICE, which continues to be programmed at LGBTQ+ festivals and events across the globe.
Mars is a Sundance Documentary Producers Fellow, NBC Original Voices Artist Mentor and Fellow, PGA Create Fellow, Brown Girls Doc Mafia Sustainable Artist Fellow, Dear Producer Mentee, and was selected for DOC NYC’S 2024 “40 Under 40” cohort. Their work has been supported by Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, and the International Documentary Association, among others.
Samantha Curley
Samantha Curley is an award-winning documentary film producer and creative entrepreneur based in Los Angeles. She is the Co-Founder of Level Ground, which is both a 501(c)3 nonprofit artist collective and a collaboratively run production company. The first film she produced, FRAMING AGNES (dir. Chase Joynt), premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and Audience Award and went on to win the 2023 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary.
She is a graduate of Northwestern University and the Kellogg School of Management and currently holds fellowships with the Producers Guild of America, Impact Partners, and NBCU Original Voices. In 2023, she received a Cali Catalyst grant awarded to California changemakers creating tangible impact within the arts and culture sector, shifting power and influence to historically underrepresented voices.
Martin DiCicco
Martin DiCicco is a cinematographer and director whose work includes ALL THAT PASSES BY THROUGH A WINDOW THAT DOESN’T OPEN, HERE THERE IS NO EARTH, GIRLS GOT GAME, SEARCHERS, THE HOTTEST AUGUST, LANDFALL, and forthcoming films by Angelo Madsen Minax, Timothy George Kelly, Iva Radivojević and Jem Cohen.
Blair McClendon
Blair McClendon is a New York based writer, film editor, and filmmaker. His films have screened at Sundance, Cannes, Tribeca, and TIFF, and include AFTERSUN, AFTER SHERMAN, THE ASSISTANT, MR. SOUL!, GIVE UP THE GHOST, and WALK FOR MEHAS. Blair’s writing has been published in n+1, the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.
Malika Zouhali-Worrall
Malika Zouhali-Worrall is a British/Moroccan editor and director based in New York. She most recently edited THROUGH THE NIGHT (2020), which was a New York Times and Hollywood Reporter Critics' Pick, and named as one of The Guardian’s Best Documentaries of 2020. An Emmy Award-winning director, Malika's directing credits include CALL ME KUCHU (2012), THANK YOU FOR PLAYING (2015), and VIDEO VISIT (2022). Her films have screened at the Berlin Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, True/False, AFI Festival, Blackstar and SXSW, and broadcast on Netflix, the BBC, The New York Times, ARTE and PBS. Malika is a 2020 Sundance Momentum Fellow, a 2020 William Greaves Award recipient, and a 2021 Adobe Women at Sundance fellow.
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (b. 1975) is an artist, curator and composer that works primarily with, but not limited to voice and modular synthesizer for sound works in the realm of spontaneous music, which lends itself to Lowe’s aleatoric process. As of late Lowe has directed focus on composition for film and television. Over the last several years Robert has scored CANDYMAN for Nia DaCosta, THE COLOR OF CARE and POWER for Yance Ford, MASTER for Mariama Diallo, GRASSHOPPER REPUBLIC for Daniel McCabe, the docuseries TELEMARKETERS and UNION for Brett Story and Stephen Maing.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS
Adam McKay
Todd Schulman
Press
Take Action
With 1.5 million employees globally, Amazon is actively setting the standard for a future of work defined by automation, surveillance, lack of safety, and employee turnover rates as high as 150%. In the United States, despite an uptick in worker stoppages, boycotts and strikes last year, union density is at an all-time low. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that just 10% of hourly and salaried workers were members of unions, or around 14.4 million people. More recently, Amazon joined Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Trader Joe’s in a legal fight to declare the National Labor Relations Board as unconstitutional.
Amazon is aggressively setting the anti-union standard for the future of labor in the United States and globally.
Worker organizing at Amazon is critical for redefining our economic and political futures – this single corporation controls much of the Internet’s infrastructure, it dictates terms of online retail globally, it sells cloud services to militaries around the globe, and has hollowed out the mainstreets of towns and cities across the country. Warehouse workers are joined by tech workers, activists, and the public to challenge these corporate bosses and force change.
Inspired by the ALU’s “for the people by the people” union campaign, we’re distributing UNION ourselves and couldn’t be more excited to bring it directly to audiences nationwide. This is where you come in. We need your help to bring UNION to the people. We see this as an invaluable opportunity to show support for the labor movement. If you’d like to partner with us on the release of UNION, please contact team@unionthefilm.com.
UNION is proud to partner with a number of organizations working at the frontlines of the global labor movement.
Learn more about their efforts HERE:
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