Union

Vertical, furtive, flickering sequences shot on a smartphone. Yet we can still make out the dizzying expanse of an Amazon sorting centre, lit up in white neon. This type of image is both rare and precious, as the company restricts documentation by its employees of their workplaces and working conditions. Filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing - assisted by anonymous representations of the work by the people who are both executing and protesting against it - meticulously document the precarious and valiant organisation, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, of a union movement within the industry behemoth, initiated in a sorting centre on Staten Island, one of New York City's five boroughs. The framing is tight and the editing spare, communicating a certain urgency to what we see on screen: the Zoom meetings, the handing out of flyers detailing the demands of the Amazon Labor Union around the distribution plant, and the suspense before the verdict of the vote on the establishment of a union within its walls. 

Dimitri De Preux

Stephen Maing
Union, 2024
Crime + Punishment, 2018
High Tech, Low Life, 2012

Brett Story
Union, 2024
The Hottest August, 2019
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, 2016