DC LaborFest Today: Matewan, Sayles and Labor at the Portrait Gallery

If you can only see one film during this year's LaborFest, tonight's screening of the great labor classic "Matewan" with director John Sayles is the one! And we've got free tickets available on a first-come, first-served basis; just "reply" to this email. Be there -- 7p at AFI in Silver Spring -- to see Sayles receive our Labor Arts award and participate in the Q&A with him after the film.
"The people I read about in the history books and the people I met in the hills of Kentucky and West Virginia had important stories to tell and I wanted to find a way to pass them on." John  Sayles, "Thinking in Pictures; The Making of the Movie Matewan."  
Plus: hear Sayles interviewed on WPFW's Your Rights At Work.

LaborFest Today
The Struggle For Justice: Labor At The National Portrait Gallery (LaborFest Art): Tue, May 16, 1pm – 2pm
Matewan (With Director John Sayles) (LaborFest Film): Tue, May 16, 7pm – 10pm

​Coming Up Tomorrow
Iron Workers History Tour (LaborFest Art/History): Wed, May 17, 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Love Songs From Liberation Wars (LaborFest Music): Wed, May 17, 5pm – 8pm

Click below for details

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The Struggle For Justice: Labor At The National Portrait Gallery 
(LaborFest Art)
Tue, May 16, 1pm – 2pm
National Portrait Gallery, 8th St NW & F St NW, Washington, DC 20001 (map)
FREE; several spaces have just opened up; RSVP online here
“The Struggle for Justice” tour showcases the determined men and women, from key nineteenth-century historical figures to contemporary leaders, who struggled to achieve civil rights for disenfranchised or marginalized groups. The hour-long tour features more than forty photographs, paintings, posters, buttons and sculptures, includes portraits of civil rights leaders Frederick Douglass, Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr.; women’s-rights advocates Carrie Chapman Catt and Betty Friedan; Native American activist Leonard Crow Dog; cultural icons Jackie Robinson and singer Marian Anderson; United Farm Workers organizer César Chávez; LGBT rights leader Sylvia Rivera; and Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver. 
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Matewan (With Director John Sayles) (LaborFest Film)
Tue, May 16, 7pm – 10pm
AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, MD 20910
Hosted by NNU; For tickets visit here or hit "reply" for free passes
With Chris Cooper, James Earl Jones. Based on the 1920 showdown between coal miners determined to form a union and coal company agents hired to prevent them, this is one of the classic films about American labor. Trying to unite the miners, organizer Joe Kenehan explains, “They got you fightin’ white against colored, native against foreign, hollow against hollow, when you know there ain’t but two sides in this world — them that work and them that don’t. You work, they don’t. That’s all you got to know about the enemy.” Seeing an original 35mm print of Haskell Wexler’s cinematography on the big screen is an experience not to be missed. (Rochester Labor Film Series) 
​John Sayles, US, 1987, 135 min., 35mm

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