Mayworks Festival: Someone’s Still Doing the Dirty Work
By Liam Lacey
There’s an old-timey socialist ring to the title Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts, an annual month-long Toronto festival with deep labour movement roots.
Started in 1986 in Toronto (with subsequent iterations in Halifax, Winnipeg, and Vancouver), the festival was founded by the Labour Arts Media Committee of the Toronto & York Region Labour Council, an organization which traces its origins back to 1871.
Richelieu
According to its website, the council was created by “representatives of the emerging economy – barrel-makers, shoemakers, printers, bakers, cigar-makers and metalworkers” to create a collective voice for workers’ rights. Those were the days when labour leaders fought for such basic demands as the legality of trade unions, workplace safety, eight-hour days, and the end of child labour.
In today’s post-industrial service-oriented economy, when you can buy your cigars and barrels online or at the super-mall, those dirty, dangerous worksites are out of sight and usually far from mind. A corrective to that comforting illusion is the kickoff event at this year’s Mayworks festival, the film Richelieu by Quebec director, Pier-Phillipe Chevigny. The film screens on Wednesday night at Innis Town Hall, along with a discussion on migrant justice with director Chevigny and Sarom Rho of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.
Richelieu, which previously screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, is an altogether impressive first feature, tautly scripted, sensitively acted and assuredly shot by Gabriel Brault-Tardif. It’s no surprise it earned six nominations for the Canadian Screen Awards, which take place on May 31. (Though not distributed theatrically throughout English Canada, it is currently available on video on demand.)
Chevigny’s conceived of his film as a documentary exposé but when migrant workers involved were reluctant to be exposed on camera, he decided to create this social realist drama in the Ken Loach tradition. The film unfolds from the perspective of Ariane (Ariane Castellanos), a translator working for Guatemalan temporary workers in a corn-processing plant in the Richelieu Valley, at the southeast edge of the greater Montreal region.
Struggling to maintain the mortgage on her condo after a breakup, Ariane accepts the job with some misgivings, due to a past history with the bullying factory boss, Stéphane (Marc-André Grondin), an already volatile man with a blue-collar background, under constant pressure to increase production for the agri-food company.
The Guatemalan workers, on legal temporary visas, live in overcrowded conditions under 24-hour camera surveillance by the company. The men are required to pay union dues from their salaries, though they enjoy no union protections.
In addition, some of them are paying up to 40 percent of their weekly wages as finders’ fees to other workers who recommended them for the work. If they have family emergencies that require them to return home, they’ll lose their jobs, and no one has the nerve to complain about overtime or exhausting working conditions.
As she witnesses the abusive treatment of the workers, Ariane comes into increasing conflict with the plant’s bosses. Matters come to brutal climax when one of the workers, a young father named Manuel (Nelson Coronado) suffers an injury, which is seriously aggravated by Stephane’s determination to keep him on the job.
Mayworks concludes on May 31 with another film, Tomorrow’s Freedom (2022) along with a discussion, in conjunction with the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. The film, by British sisters Georgia and Sophia Scott, focuses on the history of imprisoned Palestinian leader, Marwan Barghouthi, and the harassment suffered by his West Bank family.
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw observes that “the film shows that something else has been happening as well: the Mandela-isation of Barghouti, a process which the Israeli forces themselves may well come to see as convenient, when in some future time they need an internationally accepted figure with whom to negotiate.”
Richelieu: screening May 1, Innis College Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave, 7:10 pm. Register for tickets here.
Tomorrow’s Freedom: screening May 31, Innis College Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave, 7 pm. Register for tickets here.
For a schedule of the month-long series of art exhibits, panels, films, workshops, performances, and book launches, go to the Mayworks website.