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American Dream (1990)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream_%28film%29

American Dream (1990) is a cinéma vérité documentary film directed by Barbara Kopple and co-directed by Cathy Caplan, Thomas Haneke, and Lawrence Silk.[1]

The film recounts an unsuccessful strike in the heartland of America against the Hormel Foods corporation.

Synopsis

The 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.

The local union, in defying its national union, believed that its workers should be paid more by Hormel than that of unionized workers at other companies. This came at a time when the U.S. had just emerged from a deep recession and inflation was at or near double digits, thus making the company's financial position fragile despite its profitability.

A negotiator for the national union is shown on camera explaining that their rapacity cost the national union forty years of benefits, as the local union made the mistake of "tearing up" and attempting to rework the contract, thus opening the door for Hormel to toss out guarantees and benefits that had formerly been standard. Other companies in the field subsequently followed suit, as Hormel and its contract were considered the "gold standard" in the industry.

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.

Director Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning rendering of a crippling strike at a Minnesota meat-packing plant may look dated, but the underlying theme of individuals crushed by big business remains all too timely. Using a briskly engrossing combination of first-person interviews, news broadcasts, and fly-on-the-wall encounters, Kopple creates an indelible document of a community's dissolution at the hands of larger forces. (The film is clearly on the side of the workers, but at the same time it refuses to ignore the petty infighting that eventually helped contribute to their ruin.) An alternately depressing, uplifting, and often profanely funny film that, at times, echoes Michael Moore's Roger and Me , but without that movie's distancing smarm. A movie's title has never seemed quite so bitterly apt. The director, who had previously won an Oscar for the equally arresting Harlan County USA, would later go on to document yet another traumatic event with Woody Allen's Wild Man Blues. --Andrew Wright

Name : AMERICAN_DREAM_US.avi
Format : AVI
Info : Audio Video Interleave
Family : RIFF
File size : 1.09 GiB
PlayTime : 1h 34mn

Video #0
Codec : DivX 5
Family : MPEG-4
PlayTime : 1h 34mn
Width : 720
Height : 348
Aspect ratio : 2.2
Frame rate : 29.97 fps
Resolution : 8
Chroma : 4:2:0
Interlacement : Progressive
Writing library : Lavc52.0.0

Audio #0
Codec : MPEG-1 Audio layer 3
Family : MPEG-1
Info : MPEG-1 or 2 layer 3
Codec profile : Joint stereo
Bit rate : 128 Kbps
Bit rate mode : CBR
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48 KHz
Resolution : 16

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