Product Description

Academy Award(R) Winner for Best Documentary, 1990, this acclaimed motion picture captures the stark reality of working men and women making impossibly tough choices about survival during a time of extreme economic crisis. When workers at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota, are asked to take a substantial pay cut in a highly profitable year, the local labor union decides to go on strike and fight for a wage they believe is fair. But as the work stoppage drags on and the strikers face losing everything, friends become enemies, families are divided, and the very future of this typical mid-American town is threatened! Also honored with the Directors Guild of America Award for Best Feature Documentary as well as the Grand Jury Prize, Audience Award, and the Filmmakers Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival -- you'll be riveted by the compelling real-life drama in this powerful landmark film!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62183 in DVD
• Brand: Disney
• Released on: 2004-03-02
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 98 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
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

From The New Yorker
Barbara Kopple's documentary, about a strike in a Minnesota meatpacking plant, is a lucid and unfussy piece of movie journalism that manages to be as complexly affecting as a great novel. The story that she tells here is a terrifying one. The workers at the Austin, Minnesota, plant of Geo. A. Hormel & Company decide to go on strike on August 17, 1985, rather than accept a rollback of their wages and benefits. The union, Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, is led by a militant president, Jim Guyette, and a fiery freelance consultant, Ray Rogers. Together, Guyette and Rogers create a terrific spirit of energy and resolve in the rank and file. But Lewie Anderson, a veteran negotiator for the international union, thinks that their strategy is "doomed." As the strike wears on, our reactions to what we're seeing become more volatile. Our hearts are with the pumped-up rank and file of P-9, but our heads, increasingly (and surprisingly), are with the pragmatic Anderson: his anaylsis of the local's chances against the company proves accurate in virtually every particular. The defeat of the stubborn P-9ers is agonizing to watch, and we begin to realize that Kopple's apparently even tone has nothing to do with objectivity or resignation-that it is, rather, the exaggerated calm of deep shock, the voice of an eyewitness to a smashup on the highway. The movie embodies a kind of tragic understanding of American life-tragic in the original and the fullest sense, in which the spectacle of unspeakable calamity produces pity and terror and then an unforeseeable and penetrating clarity. This is a masterpiece of social art. Academy Award for best documentary in 1991. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

A haunting film...
This movie is so dramatically powerful, it's hard to believe it's real life. It's the devastating story of what happens to a small town when it's only industry turns against it. The characters are larger-than-life and the movie sticks with you long after it's over. The viewer is taken on an emotional roller coaster ride from the hopeful beginnings of the strike to the crushing end. Having family in Austin, MN (where the film takes place), I can say that this movie hits the nail on the head all too well. See this film. It's a truly moving experience.

An excellent film about the evolution and effect a strike
This documentary traces the development of labor unrest at a company that is planning to make substantial reductions in employees' pay. The story is told primarily from the employees' viewpoint, and includes elements of corporate campaigning, local versus international union politics, internal politics, the strike, and loss of employees' jobs. The human perspective is fully developed including emotional peaks and valleys, the strife within families, the decay of relationships between workers, and the the affect on the community.

The documentary is extremely well filmed and very moving.

American Nightmare
This is the story of what happens when things get way out of control. Workers at a Hormel factory go on strike due to pay decreases and all hell breaks loose. They turn against each other over certain issues. It is a bleak and disturbing look at how low some people can go and the evil things they can impose on love ones and friends when "loyalty" is broken. Haunting.