USA,
1990, 100 min
Shown in 1991
CREDITS
- dir
-
Barbara Kopple
- prod
-
Barabra Kopple, Arthur Cohn
- cam
-
Peter Gilbert, Kevin Keating, Hart Perry
- editor
-
Cathy Caplan, Tom Haneke, Larry Silk
- source
-
Cabin Creek Center
-
COMMENTS
Barbara Kopple in person.
OTHER
Thirteen years after her Oscar-winning Harlan County, USA, Barbara Kopple has produced another brilliantly original inquiry into the American social and political landscape. For over six years she documented the course of a strike by the workers of Local P-9 of the International Union of Meat Cutters in Austin, Minnesota, where the Hormel Company imposed a substantial wage reduction on the 1500 workers in its meat-packing plant. Coming in the midst of the Reagan era, the cuts were a shock to the expectations of middle-class, union wage earners and provoked the union into a strike that management clearly had anticipated and was ready to deal with at any cost. However, American Dream is not a black-and-white story of the injustices of corporate America. What emerges from the struggle is a strategic battle within the union itself, pitting the local against the international and fragmenting the union. Kopple's film is a passionate and moving portrait of the cold-hearted consequences of the strife for individual workers and their families. Their small town is tragically torn apart, pitting brother against brother, and friend against friend, in a no-win situation.
—Geoff Gilmore
FACTOID #188
According to an item in the 1969 Halloween edition of the Hollywood Reporter, Swedish director Bo Widerberg cancelled a Festival tribute at the last minute with a cryptic telegram from Stockholm that read, ’Sorry impossible to come. Must stay in bed.’
