The Killing Floor

Review Winner - Special Jury Award - Sundance Film Festival Official Selection - Cannes Film Festival Winner - Special Jury Award - USA Film Festival Nominated - Best Actor - NAACP Nominated - Best Actress - NAACP Nominated - Best Episode - NAACP Official Selection - London Int'l. Film Festival Official Selection - Mill Valley Film Festival Official Selection - Locarno Film Festival Official Selection - Blacklight Film Festival Official Selection - Los Angeles Film Festival --- Rich and revealing, a cry of historical dimensions... - Variety A rare American labor union drama centered on Black experience, The Killing Floor is a minor miracle of narrative history, succeeding as drama, as pedagogy, and as a model of independent, inclusive, collaborative, local, unionized filmmaking. The Killing Floor draws on familiar tropes and narrative conventions, but lends them a charge by introducing an alienated Black gaze to typically white spaces, pointedly validating the cultural knowledge that Black southerners bring as spectators to both the union hall and the historical drama. Celebrated dramatist Leslie Lee s screenplay further makes virtues of archetypes and blunt expository dialogue; such immediacy is critical to the film s educational economy, which captures the riot s myriad underlying causes the Great Migration, the First World War, the growth of organized labor, the European diasporas, and the centuries of exploitation and disenfranchisement of African Americans in broad yet affecting strokes...The Killing Floor wasn't so much a product of its time as a renegade in it and a treasure in ours. - Michael Metzger, Cine-File As compelling dramatically as its historical analysis is fascinating Surprising that a film from the U.S. can be so frank and explicit in its exposure of the class struggle. - James Leahy, Sight & Sound A classic study in class hate, greed and stubborn idealism. You won't forget it. --Newsday Mr. Leake, a talented and always ingratiating actor, provides a strong and intensely charged dramatic core. His wife is affectingly played by Alfre Woodard. This pilot certainly makes a strong case for an extended series. - John J. O'Connor, The New York Times The Killing Floor presents, in fascinating dialectical wrangles, the large-scale political events of the time: an original and fruitful template for the cinematic analysis of social systems and confrontation with history. - Richard Brody, The New Yorker The Killing Floor is a truly compelling, blistering, and vital historical document. Powerful, hard-hitting, but still exceptionally and tenderly crafted... - Jen Johans, Film Intuition Bill Duke's underseen and recently restored directorial debut, The Killing Floor ... is technically a made-for-TV movie; it debuted via PBS s American Playhouse series. But it has all the heft and energy of a theatrical movie epic, which suits its subject: the fight, among Black and white stockyard workers in early-20th-century Chicago, to form an interracial workers union. --K. Austin Collins, Vanity Fair Product Description A film by Bill Duke; An Elsa Rassbach Production. Newly restored in 4K and praised by The Village Voice as the most "clear-eyed account of union organizing on film," The Killing Floor tells the little-known true story of the struggle to build an interracial labor union in the Chicago Stockyards. The screenplay by Obie Award-winner Leslie Lee, based on an original story by producer Elsa Rassbach, traces the racial and class conflicts seething in the city's giant slaughterhouses, and the brutal efforts of management to divide the workforce along ethnic lines, which eventually boiled over in the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. The first feature film by director Bill Duke, The Killing Floor premiered on PBS' American Playhouse series in 1984 to rave reviews. In 1985 the film was invited to Cannes and won the Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Award. It has been showcased at the Lincoln Center and festivals around the world. New 4K restoration. Laboratory services by UCLA Film & Television Archive Digital Media Lab; Audio Services by Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, Inc.; Digital Color Grading by Planemo (Berlin) and Alpha-Omega digital (Münich). Special thanks to Elsa Rassbach and the Sundance Institute Collection at UCLA Film & Television Archive.
ASIN: B08L1JQLL3
VSKU: DBV.B08L1JQLL3.G
Condition: Good
Author/Artist:Alfre Woodard|Dennis Farina|Damien Leake|Moses Gunn|Clarence Felder|Bill Duke
Binding: Dvd
Note: Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.
Condition Notes: Individually inspected: Guaranteed to play perfectly or your money back. Case may show wear and may be in library packaging. Ships Fast!