Two Free Labor Film Screenings This Week: “Love and Solidarity” & “The Spirit of '45”

Two free screenings this week serve as a warm-up for next month’s 15th annual DC Labor FilmFest. Tomorrow, the FilmFest co-hosts a screening of “Love and Solidarity: Rev. James Lawson and Nonviolence in the Search for Workers’  Rights” with the Labor Heritage Foundation and then on Friday the FilmFest is co—sponsoring a screening of Ken Loach’s “The Spirit of '45.” Tomorrow’s noontime screening at the AFL-CIO features filmmaker and author Michael Honey and Friday’s screening at American University includes a pre-film reception. Click below to read more.

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“Love and Solidarity” What can people do to change a world full of violence and hate? Is nonviolent revolution possible? “Love and Solidarity” – screening Tuesday, April 7 at noon at the AFL-CIO -- addresses these questions through the life and thought of Rev. James Lawson, an African American Methodist minister who worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., to initiate civil rights struggles in the South in the 1960s, and in recent years taught nonviolence organizing to poor Black and Latino workers in coalitions that have remade the labor movement in Los Angeles. Through interviews with Rev. Lawson and historic film footage, acclaimed labor and civil rights historian Michael Honey and award-winning filmmaker Errol Webber place a needed discourse on nonviolent social change at the forefront of today's struggles against violence and for human rights, peace, and economic justice. Hosted by the Labor Heritage Foundation and co-sponsored by the DC Labor FilmFest. Copies of Honey’s books – Sharecropper’s Troubadour” and “Going Down Jericho Road” will be available for purchase.

“The Spirit of '45” is a documentary film by British director Ken Loach, focused on and celebrating the radical changes in postwar Britain under the Labour government of Clement Attlee, which came to power in 1945. Relying primarily on archive footage and interviews, and without a narrative voiceover, the film – which screens Friday, April 10 at American University, with a reception at 6:30 p.m. in SOC's Media Innovation Lab in the McKinley Building -- recounts the endemic poverty in prewar Britain, the sense of optimism that followed victory in World War 2 and the subsequent expansion of the welfare state, founding of the National Health Service and nationalization of significant parts of the UK's economy. The film documents the extent to which these achievements, as Loach sees them, have since been subject to attack in the decades that followed, particularly under the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. “Generosity, mutual support and co-operation were the watch words of the age,” says Loach. “It is time to remember the determination of those who were intent on building a better world.”  Presented by the National Gallery of Art and American University's School of Communications, and co-sponsored by the British Council and the DC Labor FilmFest