In Toronto, Izabel, Bebeth, Natasha, Benoît, Grace and Jean, members of Ontario’s “working poor” directly affected by the economic crisis, agree to take part in group sessions organized by filmmaker Geoff Bowie. They talk about having to work multiple jobs to get by, describe the stress generated by financial vulnerability, and courageously explain their strategies for getting out of their difficult situation. Touching, insightful and full...

The story of the 1939 Missouri sharecroppers strike reveals the complex issues of cotton farming in the early 1930s and what it was like to be a sharecropper in that time. One wintry morning in January 1939, residents of southeastern Missouri awoke to a startling sight. More than 1,000 sharecroppers - mostly African American but whites too - had camped out alongside two state highways with their families and a few meager belongings. They were taking...

The uprising of '34 is a startling documentary which tells the story of the General Strike of 1934, a massive but little-known strike by hundreds of thousands of Southern cotton mill workers during the Great Depression. The mill workers' defiant stance, and the remarkable grassroots organizing that led up to it, challenged a system of mill owner control that had shaped life in cotton mill communities for decades. Sixty years after the government brutally...

This playlist includes the following special features from Kuhle wampe or Who owns the world, How the Berlin worker lives (dir. Slatan Dudow, 1930) Slatan Dudow: a film about a marxist artist (dir. Volker Koepp, 1974) original prologue, with Herbert Jhering, 1958.

A teen bounty hunter is torn between helping or capturing a seductive fugitive bank robber hiding in his small town during the Great Depression.

In the middle of the Great Depression, Lennie and George find work on the Tyler Ranch, planning on saving towards a place of their own. Their plan is disrupted when Lennie gets into trouble with the owner's son and his unhappy wife.

The story of the Joad family and their migration to California from their dust-bowl farm in Oklahoma during the Depression.

In 1933, a city boy arrives at his late mother's rural Utah birthplace to discover the locals have been pestered by drought, feuding, and a cougar.

In 1929, just as the Depression has hit, newlywed couple George and Serena Pemberton, move from Boston to North Carolina to build a timber empire. Although Serena proves herself to be an important part of their success, overseeing crews and handling every bit of trouble that comes upon them, when Serena discovers she's unable to bear children, it sets her on a path of destruction.

A young divorcee, Mildred Pierce, rises up out of poverty to become a successful business woman in spite of hardships and her selfish daughter. This five-part drama is an intimate portrait of a uniquely independent woman who finds herself newly divorced during the Depression years, as she struggles to carve out a new life for herself and her family. The story explores Mildred's unreasonable devotion to her insatiable daughter Veda, as well as the...