Hacker Cinema
Brassed Off
1996 · Film · 107 min
Directed by Mark Herman
A Yorkshire coal mine is threatened with closure and the only hope is for the men to enter their Grimley Colliery Brass Band into a national competition. They believe they have no hope until Gloria appears carrying her Flugelhorn. At first mocked for being a woman, she soon becomes the only chance for the band to win.
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2 comments on Hacker News
I'd say it was The Full Monty and Brassed Off. I'd say it was almost a mini-genre at the start of the Blair years.
There's also Made in Dagenham. There's probably lots of french language films with workers struggle. The one that springs to mind is the hilarious satire Louise-Michel
Cynical me suspects that the large corporations who get to decide which TV show or feature films get to be made are opposed to depicting workers organising and acting on behalf of their collective interest. This seems to be particularly true in America more so than Europe, e.g, Brassed Off, a British film from the mid-nineties realistically displays working class culture associated with labour unions at a time when the unions were struggling against the closure of the coal pits. Interestingly, according to its Wikipedia article¹, “In the United States, the film was promoted simply as a romantic comedy involving McGregor and Fitzgerald's characters.”
On the other hand, Season 4 of For All Mankind depicted a strike of private sector workers in such an unrealistic, ham-fisted way that it couldn’t be taken seriously – much like many of the other half-assed story-lines that were crammed into the show for Seasons 3 and 4.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassed_Off