Hacker Cinema
Workingman's Death
2005 · Film · documentary · 122 min
Directed by Michael Glawogger
Is heavy manual labour disappearing or is it just becoming invisible? Where can we still find it in the 21st century? Workingman's Death follows the trail of the HEROES in the illegal mines of the Ukraine, sniffs out GHOST among the sulphur workers in Indonesia, finds itself face to face with LIONS at a slaughterhouse in Nigeria, mingles with BROTHERS as they cut a huge oil tanker into pieces in Pakistan, and joins Chinese steel workers in hoping for a glorious FUTURE.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
3 comments on Hacker News
There's a documentary called Workingman's Death about the worst jobs in the world: not in an amusing Mike Rowe way, but jobs that are backbreaking, pay a pittance and regularly kill in horrible ways. And there's no commentary, no soundtrack, just unstaged video footage, ambient sounds, and people talking about their jobs and why they do it.
One of the segments, Brothers, is about the Gadani shipbreaking yards in Pakistan: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xr722r_working-man-s-death-brothers_news
The other episodes are worth watching too, particularly the Indonesian sulphur mine and the Nigerian butchery. The first of these is also a tourist attraction, and they film tourists doing it for kicks while the workers talk about seeing their friends make a single misstep, fall into a sulphur pit and boil to death in front of their eyes.
Michael Glawogger, an Austrian documentary director, who died tragically in a car crash in 2014, made a 2005 documentary partly about Pashtun workers in Pakistan who dismantle ships. The part about the ship-breaking workers starts at about 1:21:10 and lasts about 25 minutes. It's really fascinating - I highly recommend it. The documentary is called "Workingman's Death". Actually, the whole documentary is really good: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478331/
There is an interesting segment on this in the documentary "Workingman's Death".
https://vimeo.com/88162472 from 1:21:00. The entire film is quite beautifully photographed. Too bad it has not been released in an HD format yet.
Workingman's Death is probably my favorite Michael Glawogger film. It feels less staged and fake than "Megacities".