by Vanessa Mangiavacca and Alice Capitani
Work is one of the great myths of the collective consciousness of Western capitalist society, an inextricable knot of social, economic and cultural challenges that shape who we are. Assembly lines, exploitation, invisible acts of care, abuses and precariousness: the belief that work is a means of personal fulfillment falls to pieces.
Yet, work is also a means of emancipation and affirmation, a right to be defended collectively, although it gets easily ignored, even when we have the possibility to express ourselves on it, as confirmed by the failure of the recent Italian referendums on labour rights. Get to Work focuses on rights and protections, with a selection of international short films. Stories of life that often get shattered, that develop among mines, factories, butcher shops and building sites: places marked by the tough work of male bodies. Indeed, men are the protagonists of such spaces, showing how narratives can propagate hierarchies and gender stereotypes in workplaces.
For this first edition, we have chosen not to include stories of working women, aware of the different layers to be considered in relation to the connection between public and private, home, work and society. In this way, Get to Work embraces two important and urgent contemporary issues, i.e. the environmental crisis and immigration, in the hope that they will soon be part of the same fight.
Films featured:
24 Cinematic Points Of View Of A Factory Gate In China by Ho Rui An, Singapore, Spain, 2023, 25′
In Retrospect by Mila Zhluktenko & Daniel Asadi Faezi, Germany, 2025, 14′
Mercenaire by Pier-Philippe Chevigny, Canada, Quebec, 2024, 15′
Niederurnen, GL by Anna Joos, Switzerland, 2025, 20′
Progress Mining by Gabriel Böhmer, UK, Switzerland, 2024, 16′
Trokas Duras by Jazmin Garcia, USA, 2025, 17′