Why a Canadian director’s documentary on Amazon’s labour unrest is striking a chord | Canada Voices

In the week leading up to Christmas, 7,000 Amazon employees went on strike in New York, Atlanta and San Francisco, amounting to the largest labour action in the company’s history. Among those striking workers were employees at Amazon’s JFK8 fulfillment centre on Staten Island, which two years ago became the company’s first warehouse to successfully unionize.

Adding to the momentum of this movement, a documentary about JFK8′s unionization, titled Union, was shortlisted for an Academy Award the day before the strike. The film, co-directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, follows the small group of JFK8 workers that, with grit, ingenuity and almost superhuman self-belief, manage to eventually form the Amazon Labor Union.

The filmmakers eschew narration and talking heads, and instead patiently observe the slow, messy labour of organizing, as attentive to its frustrations as to its rewards. While the film inevitably focuses on the nascent union’s first president, the charismatic and controversial Chris Smalls, it provides plenty of room for his fellow organizers and their particular perspectives. It’s a political film of rare intimacy, and quietly inspirational.

“It’s really valuable to see people win,” Story says of her protagonists. “Like, we don’t see people win, ever.”

Story, a Torontonian, had made previous docs about climate change and the American prison industry, as well as a short film, CamperForce, about itinerant Amazon workers. After Union’s producers, Samantha Curley and Mars Verrone, decided they wanted to make a film about Smalls, they enlisted Story.

She moved to New York in the spring of 2021 and started working on the film. After five months, given the demands of the filmmaking and her personal life – the pandemic was still raging, she had a two-year-old daughter, and a full-time job teaching in the cinema studies department at the University of Toronto – she joined forces with Maing, a Brooklyn-based documentarian.

Story then travelled back-and-forth from Toronto and New York, while Maing and their small crew remained on the ground in Staten Island. Story reviewed rushes at home – in the end, they had about 700 hours of footage – and she and Maing would discuss them over the phone.

“It’s actually really useful to have that on a film,” Story says, “because you can get so mired in inner drama and minor details that you can’t quite see what’s translating to an outside viewer.”

Union has, fittingly, racked up a number of impressive wins itself. It premiered at Sundance last January, where it received the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for the Art of Change. It’s since played more than a hundred international festivals, and counting. It’s been a critical darling, as well, with both the New York Times and New York magazine calling it one of the year’s best films.

One fact, however, has both overshadowed and underscored Union’s success: no major distributor will touch the film. Despite the acclaim, hiring what Story calls one of the industry’s best sales agents and receiving praise from a number of buyers, Union remains unsold a year after its premiere.

Story’s still a bit mystified by the situation, but argues that, in an era of increased media consolidation, where a handful of tech companies largely control what we see, hear and read, the film’s subject has scared off potential distributors.

“Amazon’s a big studio and a big streaming platform, and many smaller players have to work with them,” she says.

“So when we talk to theatrical distributors that have more than one client, some of them have said, ‘I have to work with Amazon and this would compromise my relationship with them.’ Is Amazon calling up Netflix and saying, ‘Don’t buy this movie?’ I don’t think that’s happening. But I also think their interests are the same.”

Making things difficult, as well, is distributors’ seeming aversion to risk. The big streamers have for years avoided politically or artistically innovative films, Story argues, preferring instead tried-and-true subjects such as celebrity and true-crime docs.

“I think our film is risky for political reasons because it shows in real time a group of people challenging a big tech corporation.”

Four months after Union premiered, the filmmakers decided to distribute it themselves. On the one hand, that route has given them more control of where and how the film is shown. They’ve held free screenings for other unions and Amazon workers, thanks to a special online fund they set up on their website.

But it’s also an additional full-time job that the directors didn’t anticipate having to take on. Story is still teaching, and working on a new documentary – an archival film about the late writer and critic, John Berger – but has spent much of the last year travelling with Union and doing yet more rounds of press.

“With self-distribution, it’s partly about becoming your own hype machine,” she says.

This distribution hiccup, in a way, parallels the scrappy journey of the Amazon Labour Union itself. Nobody thought the organizers would succeed, and even after they did, their fight was just beginning: Amazon still refuses to recognize the union, nor will they negotiate a contract with it. Hence, the strike last month. While that job action ended on Dec. 24, the Teamsters, with whom the ALU affiliated last June, have promised further labour disruptions this year.

When Union premiered, union membership in the United States was about 10 per cent, half of it what it was 30 years earlier. But there has been, in the past couple of years, a resurgence of union activity, led by young, diverse workers at places such as Starbucks and Trader Joe’s (and in Canada, at Indigo and Via Rail).

While Story hesitates to describe her film as an organizational tool, she recognizes its power as such, and is pleased to play a role in this resurgence: “It’s really useful to see real people who are not particularly heroic, just regular people like you and me, put the work in and scare the hell out of a massive company that we know has way too much power.”

Union screens Jan. 11 and 12 at the Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto, and can be streamed at unionthefilm.com until Jan. 17.

Special to The Globe and Mail