American Dream
(film)
American Dream (1990) is an award-winning cinéma vérité documentary film directed by Barbara Kopple and co-directed by Cathy Caplan, Thomas Haneke, and Lawrence Silk.
The film recounts an unsuccessful strike in the heartland of America against the Hormel FoodThe film is centered on unionized meatpacking workers at Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota between 1985 and 1986. Hormel had cut the hourly wage from $10.69 to $8.25 and cut benefits by 30 percent despite posting a net profit of $30 million. The local union (P-9) opposed the cut, but the international union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, did not support them.
The local union is shown hiring a freelance strike consultant, Ray Rogers, who comes in with charts, graphs and promises of a corporate campaign to draw national press attention. Rogers delivers in the short term, but, it is not enough to defeat opposition from Hormel management and the UFCW international union.
American Dream features footage of union meetings and press releases, Hormel press releases, news broadcasts, and in-depth interviews with people on both sides of the issue, including Jesse Jackson.
The film took five years to complete and was partly funded by actor Edward Asner, director John Sayles, and the public-service British television station Channel Four Films.
In an interview, Kopple explained why she had
once again taken on the topic of unions and strikes after her successful award-winning
film Harlan County, USA. She said: "In Harlan County, there was such a strong
union movement. It seemed that people really cared about workers' struggles and
what happened to workers. When I was reading and trying to figure out why plants
were closing and why there could be so many wage concessions, it seemed the natural
thing to go and explore in the mid-to-late eighties what was happening in America,
and how things had changed from the late seventies."[
Awards
Wins
Academy
Awards: Oscar; Best Documentary, Barbara Kopple and Arthur Cohn; 1991.
International
Documentary Association: IDA Award; Barbara Kopple; 1991.
Los Angeles Film
Critics Association Awards: LAFCA Award; Best Documentary; 1991.
Sundance
Film Festival: Audience Award Documentary; Filmmakers Trophy Documentary; Grand
Jury Prize Documentary; all for Barbara Kopple; 1991.
Directors Guild of America:
DGA Award; Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary/Actuality; Barbara
Kopple; 1992.
National Society of Film Critics Awards: NSFC Award; Best Documentary;
1993.
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