Hello, and welcome to the London Labour Film Festival!

Since 2012, thousands of you have witnessed nearly one hundred films dedicated to the documentation, analysis, and celebration of the lives of the majority of the world’s population: the working class.  We’re excited to announce that the LLFF is back and it’s coming directly to your homes with our eagerly anticipated online platform.

This isn’t to say that we are abandoning cinemas altogether, far from it, we are cinephiles, but we are focusing our efforts and resources this year on building our online festival. This we hope will mean that more people can access the festival and we can build bigger audiences both online and offline to come together to celebrate labour cinema.

Check out the events tab for upcoming cinema events.

In the past we’ve shown every kind of film that you can imagine. Films such as Mike Leigh’s comedy-drama High Hopes, exploring values in Thatcher’s Britain, to disturbing documentaries like Glawogger’s Working Man’s Death, showing the extremes to which workers will go to earn a living. We have had walkouts to screenings of Zobel’s controversial film Compliance, based on true story of fast-food workers in America. We also screen off-beat cinema such as Carpenter’s cult classic They Live which explores themes of consumer culture and capitalism alongside classic labour cinema such as Norma Rae, Silkwood, Grapes of Wrath and Made in Dagenham.

Labour cinema is not restricted by genre. Every film can be distinct, but they can also share that common theme: how labour issues affect us all as a society.

“Labor film festivals celebrate the art of film and it’s certainly true that at labour film festivals you’ll find movies that will entertain you, make you laugh, and make you cry. They’ll also bring you out of the theatre angry and determined to do something to change the world. That’s a difference worth celebrating and continuing to spread around the world” – Chris Garlock, DC Labor film festival organiser.

 

A festival is never a festival without the people that makes these films happen so do watch this space for our special guests at our online events.

We hope you can join us, as we take the LLFF online.

See you there.

Anna Burton and the LLFF team