Austrian writer-director Glawogger (Megacities) has made a film about the backbreaking work endured by many international laborers. He has also made a film that is remarkably beautiful at times, and offers moments of levity and a certain amount of hope for the future. Glawogger traveled the world to explore several of the most dangerous and grueling jobs imaginable, and we witness them here: Ukrainian coal diggers crawling through narrow crevices; Indonesian sulfur harvesters working on the edge of a volcanic crater; Pakistani freighter dismantlers sending giant pieces of iron into the Arabian Sea; Nigerian open-air slaughterhouse workers killing and roasting hundreds of goats and cows amid pools of blood. (The stop in Nigeria is the most disturbing, but if you can get through it, the film is well worth seeing.) "Glawogger is an extraordinarily elegant filmmaker with a photographer's eye for striking compositions. He seems to have selected the jobs documented here as much for their telegenic qualites as their all-around awfulness, and he excels at divining moments of pure cinema and haunting beauty out of the most perilous places and professions on Earth." (The Onion A.V. Club) Winner of the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival, for its "breathtaking visuals and insightful representations of the global interconnectivity and humanity of hard work." In Russian, Bahasa Indonesian, English, Ibu, Yoruba, Pastu and Mandarin. Music by John Zorn. More at workingmansdeath.com
2006, color, 2 hours 2 minutes, Austria