In mid-July, in a sun-baked lot outside of Amazon Studios in Culver City, California, a group of writers and creatives were up in arms. They were four months into what would be a 6-month strike and picketing effort spanning the summer of 2023, fighting for a fair contract with studios. “It’s not content,” read one red and black sign. “Amazon Crime,” read another, punctuated by a depiction of the signature Amazon logo in an uncharacteristic frown.
One week prior, the National Labor Relations Board had filed a formal complaint against the manufacturing arm of that same global giant, alleging that the business had violated the law in refusing to bargain with the fledgling Amazon Labor Union representing fulfillment center workers.
A cross-sector labor resurgence, prompted by global crisis after global crisis, was well on its way. Corporations — including those blurring the lines between manufacturing, entertainment, and technology — were on notice.
The efforts of the Amazon organizers are depicted in Union, an observational documentary on the Bezos-opposed unionization of Staten Island fulfillment center JFK8 and their now-famous figurehead Chris Smalls, who led a 2020 worker walkout and was eventually fired. The film begins its theatrical run on Oct. 18.
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The 100-minute film drops viewers straight into the 2021 work of then-employees, recently fired organizers, and specially hired union salts (union organizers who seek jobs at companies just to unionize them) to draw a picture of a cross-class, multiracial effort to take back a corporate economy slipping out of the people’s control. It has only a few named subjects, no talking heads, no heroes, and, really, no villains. It, in the words of directors Brett Story and Stephen Maing, is a story of complicated people power.
Despite premiering at Sundance, where it won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for the Art of Change, and its headline-generating subject matter, the Level Ground Production film received no studio distribution interest. Over the last 8 months, it’s screened at nearly every major film festival and at national and international labor events; it’s now going to theaters under a full self-distribution plan. “Amazon Studios has a lot of power,” Story told Mashable. “We don’t know if that’s a factor behind why our film hasn’t been picked up, but it certainly adds to a nervousness and a conservatism around the choices distributors are making.”
The struggles and ethos of the workers are replicated on screen and off, with Union and its distribution strategy presenting a concerning reality and a call to action for its audiences. Touching on the rippling effects of corporate consolidation, the increasing necessity of historic documentation, and the fate of art amid conflict, the film pounds on Hollywood’s locked doors.
Union and its place in the labor revival
The first moments of Union introduce its audience to the concept of scale. A massive cargo ship filled with towering containers slowly engulfs the first frame. A rocket ship — specifically, the Blue Origin flight carrying Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — shoots through a cerulean sky into space. On the ground, employees wait for a bus.
These elements, combined with the nonstop pace of the union organizers in the film thereafter, are designed to feel all-consuming, Maing (the Academy Award–nominated director behind documentary film Crime + Punishment) explained to Mashable. Viewers watch as the film jumps from Zoom calls in cars to contentious discussions over firepits to confusing cross-borough commutes by the underdog union’s leaders; it’s all for the purpose of forward momentum. Unlike the massive scale used to set the stakes, urgency is communicated through minute details — leaders address the personal needs of workers and assuage fears of being fired.
While the social issue documentary spans more than a year of organizing, the directors were aware of the urgency of the moment, painted against the backdrop of a wave of worker movements, including in Hollywood. They saw the need to present the interconnected, complex, and messy nature of labor organizing against corporations that all pull from the same set of anti-worker — and anti-art — tactics.
Story — one of Variety’s Documentary Filmmakers to Watch, known for documentaries like climate warning The Hottest August and Camper Force, about the Amazon workers depicted in the book as well as the feature film Nomadland — wanted to explore the larger labor movement through the complicated characters behind the ALU. “In the 21st century, when unionization is at an all-time low, when many people have no generational experience being part of a labor movement or a union, their parents might not even have been part of a union, who brings themselves to an effort like this?” she asks. “Politically, how do people decide that that’s the form of political activism that they want to engage in? And then how do they learn how to do it in real time?”
Credit: Union
The documentary as a mirror
As more people join the cause, organizing becomes increasingly complicated. Organizers negotiate over who the face of the movement should be. We see Smalls, the union’s de-facto leader and later president, representing a more common working-class experience as a father and warehouse employee. He’s juxtaposed by his young, white, college-educated comrades, like Madeline, a hired “salt.”
Other organizers fight to keep Smalls and other Black and brown members safe from potential violence at the hands of security personnel, balancing the need to use his name and image for press attention with the reality of structural racism and police brutality. By the end, many are questioning whether their leader is the right choice, and ardent supporters have changed their tune.
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As the ALU negotiates PR spin, the optics of their movement, and the need for third-party support among major labor unions, morals clash, and morale is threatened.
The companies that govern what gets seen are run like tech companies…We’re feeling that in what’s being bought and distributed and made available.
Union‘s production team face some of the same battles, mirroring the ALU in the documentary’s efforts to get its message out to the public — Smalls has traveled abroad for film screenings, appeared as an honored guest for the Time 100, and joined the documentary press tour at the Sundance and New York Film festivals — while adhering to the ethos of the movement the film is representing. “There were a lot of voices in the room from an early stage. It was always very collaborative, in ways that, at times, mimicked the group of people we were watching on screen. Because, it turns out, it’s really hard to do things collectively,” said Story.
Just like their on-screen counterparts, the film’s team — backed by what are known as impact partners, like Red Owl, and independent film funders, like the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms — are strategizing a play against their own disinterested corporate giant.
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“The companies that govern what gets seen are run like tech companies,” said Story. “They’re not even run by film people anymore, or media people, who watch stuff because they care. They’re run by people who are thinking about their stock options and running things like a startup. We’re feeling that in what’s being bought and distributed and made available.”
Not only that: The state of the “social issue documentary,” or “impact film” as they’re often called these days, is nebulous. While independent films are growing in popularity among viewers, distribution markets for social issue films have collapsed, being slowly built back up by nonprofits and social organizations. Documentaries are now commonly paired with impact campaigns designed to hit social media audiences with resources or calls-to-action, Union included — not previously a norm.
“What a documentary film is and how it functions in the world is actually very mysterious to most people,” she said. “Unless you’re in the film world and you go to film festivals, your idea of a documentary film is just something that’s on Netflix.”
The decline in political cinema, the preferred term Story uses for work like hers, isn’t just an issue among artmakers. It’s a democratic concern. To filmmakers like Maing and Story, working out of a storied history of documentarians like Diary of a Harlem Family director Gordon Parks and Primary director Richard Leacock, long-form cinema is just as important a tool to political action as the written word. Citing Parks specifically, Maing refers to the camera as a “weapon of choice” in implicating the most urgent of social issues. It’s supported by the rising importance of digital documentation of the world’s crises, from citizen journalists in war-torn areas and activists armed with smartphones.
Political cinema, Story added, is “not just a vehicle synonymous with a pamphlet or an essay. Political films are also entertaining, to use the language of the media world — they make us feel alive, they make us feel connected, they pose interesting questions that we keep thinking about.” So why won’t studios put more investment in them? And what do we lose when they don’t?
Historic houses for social issue documentation that support artistic work, like the newsroom, are also losing the corporate consolidation battle, which Story says is concerning. While local news outlets are being lost and capitalism’s interests take over decision-making, media and news literacy worsens among consumers. The social media warehouses of modern audiences churn out assembly lines swamped by memes and misinformation, while films like Union struggle to get to viewers. And where streaming services could have been democratizing forces in filmmaking, getting previously inaccessible or uninvested films into the homes of audiences, corporate-owned services are now shutting the gates to audiences and artists.
The current distribution landscape would have us believe that, without a major distributor or streamer studio, you’ll be hard pressed to get national exposure for your little documentary.
“What does it say about the world, and our capacity to become more intelligent actors in it, if the media we consume is governed by a set of cynical calculations about how we can’t stand to watch a single image for more than two seconds, and how audiences don’t want to see anything except for celebrities and true crime?” asked Story.
Documenting conflict, protest, and change freely is the first hurdle. Getting audiences in community to view the work is another. In Union, organizers crash mandatory meetings of Amazon employees held by union busters, a tactic known as captive audience audience meetings, in order to get out the word on the ALU. In theaters, where audience are similarly held to one space for an extended amount of time, Union hopes to convince viewers to reclaim political power. “It’s the only captive audience viewing that is actually beneficial to the people who get to view it,” said Maing.
Seeding a people-first film environment
Union’s campaign team, like the ALU’s, views their situation as an organizing opportunity, not in economic terms. “When you don’t see your needs being met by the existing landscape — whether it’s a corporate landscape of jobs or it’s a landscape of big unions that you feel like have abandoned you — then you take things into your own hands,” said Story.
Union‘s self-distribution in limited theaters across the country is matched by a wave of guerrilla marketing. The team has and will continue hosting Amazon worker screenings across dozens of Amazon “chokepoint” warehouses vital to the movement. They will launch a five-day screening pegged to Black Friday, inevitably hitting one of Amazon’s most profitable days of the year, and even project opportunities to see the film on the sides of Amazon warehouse buildings, just like the ALU did with its own messaging: “You are not a number. You are not disposable. You are a human being.”
“This has been a really exciting experience, to call the shots and allow us to be impact and community forward in our distribution ideas,” Maing explained, “as opposed to watching our relationship to the actual release of the film be broken and taken out of our control.”
“The ALU was a nascent grassroots organization that was told they would never be able to pull off organizing Amazon. Amazon was an un-organizable space,” said Maing. “The current distribution landscape would have us believe that, without a major distributor or streamer studio, you’ll be hard pressed to get national exposure for your little documentary. I think the contrary has been proven.” Maing says that with the alignment of audiences and filmmakers, big studio and streamer gatekeepers could be taken to task. Amazon, increasingly at the center of both industries, could be hit from all sides.
Such attempts at independent, morally-aligned theatrical campaigns aren’t trying to sneak by the industry’s gatekeepers, but rather reach the people outside the gates.
“People are hungry for stories that describe and reflect the desire to feel like we have power over our lives,” said Story. “That these beasts, these power conglomerates that we’re faced with, are not insurmountable. That we can take them on.”
Union is in select theaters through October.