"This is the kind of movie you watch with horrified fascination, as families lose their incomes and homes, management plays macho hardball, and rights and wrongs grow hopelessly tangled...The people in this film are so real they make most movie characters look like inhabitants of the funny page." - Roger Ebert
"Kopple's account could not have captured raw emotion any better if the dialogue had been scripted and the characters professionally cast." Sam Roberts, New York Times
Opens May 1 | Winner of the 1991 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Barbara Kopple’s AMERICAN DREAM unflinchingly details the explosive 1985–86 labor strike against Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota, a city ripped apart in the tumult. Fed up with dangerous plant conditions and drastic wage cuts, Austin’s Local P-9 went against the advice of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and, with the help of labor activist Ray Rogers’s campaign to damage the meatpacking giant’s public reputation, conducted a nearly yearlong walkout. But as the strike dragged on, some workers found themselves desperate to make ends meet and ready to cross the picket line, dividing a community already betrayed by a once progressive company and roiled by blockades, riots, and the intervention of the National Guard. Following up her landmark documentary HARLAN COUNTY, USA with another engrossing report from the trenches of working-class America, Kopple poignantly captures the human and political costs of one of the most significant setbacks to organized labor amid the unchecked corporatism of the Reaganomics era. Siskel Film Center exclusive.
Celebrate May Day by watching this stirring movie and Kopple's previous feature, HARLAN COUNTY, USA.
Awards & Nominations
1991 Academy Awards - Winner Best Documentary
1991 Sundance Film Festival - Winner Grand Jury Prize Documentary
The Film Center is ADA accessible. This presentation will be projected without open captions. The theater is hearing-loop equipped. For accessibility requests, please email filmcenter@saic.edu