A Fireside Stacks Film Festival

For an intimate look at the lives of workers around the world . . .

Nomadland (2020)

Nomadland is hardly an underappreciated movie: In 2020, it won the Academy Awards for best picture, director, and actress. Frances McDormand stars as Fern, a recent widow working a seasonal job at an Amazon warehouse after the gypsum factory where she and her husband worked closes. Unable to find work in her Nevada hometown, she moves into a van and begins driving around the country, stopping to work seasonal jobs and meeting communities of fellow nomads (many of them would-be retirees) along the way. Notably, most of her fellow nomads are playing themselves (that is, they aren’t actors). Nomadland traces Fern’s personal journey, but it is also the story of diminished industrial policy that has gutted communities across the country and left people like Fern behind. The life that Fern and her fellow nomads build arises from a lack of public investment in job creation and in the absence of a sufficient social safety net. — Noa

→ Related reads: Check out Roosevelt’s extensive industrial policy series and see Hiba Hafiz’s brief on the need for a federal job guarantee in rural and distressed communities.

Umberto D. (1952)

This legendary Italian film follows the story of Umberto D. Ferrari (Carlo Battisti), a Roman pensioner living with his beloved dog in the economic fallout of WWII. Things go from bad to worse for Umberto. His pension isn’t enough to live off of, and despite organizing efforts, the Italian government won’t increase it. His cruel landlady (Lina Gennari) plans to evict him, and only the teenage maid (Maria-Pia Casilio) will empathize. He tries creative solutions (such as feigning illness to live at a hospital) but ultimately finds himself homeless and penniless. This is a story of policy failure. The essential programs depicted in the film, like supplemental income and nutrition, prove insufficient. The government is incapable of expanding them, and people like Umberto suffer the consequences. Told with humor and resilience, it’s no surprise that Umberto D. has stood the test of time. — Lina

→ Related reads: Try this Fireside Stacks post on the policy failure of Supplemental Security Income recipients living in poverty, and follow K. Sabeel Rahman’s work on building state capacity.

Roma (2018)

2018’s Roma is a zoomed-in look into the life of a domestic worker, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), who works for an affluent family in 1970–71 Mexico City during a time of income inequality, political unrest, and violent crackdowns on protests. The film’s slow and meditative pace allows you to experience the day-to-day life of the domestic and childcare workers that keep the economy running no matter what is happening in the family unit or outside the walls of the home. There is a real reverence that the film seems to have for Cleo’s work, labor that is so often made invisible in our cultural narratives. It also deftly addresses the potential for blurred boundaries in care work, especially when it is done in the home. With a quiet intensity, Roma encourages the viewer to think about the class, racial, and gender dynamics of care work in a subtle and affecting way. — Lena

→ Related reads: Check out Roosevelt’s briefs on the macroeconomic implications of care work and investing in the care economy.

For rousing manifestos against corporate power . . .

Tout Va Bien (1972)

Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Tout Va Bien offers a timeless cinematic analysis of labor relations, media, and corporate power. The film follows a factory strike in France through the eyes of an American correspondent (Jane Fonda) and her husband (Yves Montand), a ​​former film-turned-commercial director. The film portrays the factory as a microcosm of class struggle, with its now famous cross-sectional shots of the factory that showcase its entire structure both visually and thematically. Through a critical examination of production processes and workplace hierarchies, the film visualizes concepts central to progressive economic analysis, from labor power to class consciousness. Tout Va Bien also explores how media representation of labor struggles shapes public understanding while also offering a pointed critique of consumerism and political disengagement. Most successfully, the film reframes the economy as a political entity rather than merely a technical sphere, making it deeply relevant to current debates around corporate accountability and labor mobilization. — Ira

→ Related reads: Learn about the impact of 2023’s UAW strike, why policymakers must keep up with increasingly successful union actions and positive public opinion toward labor unions, and how sectoral bargaining could put more power into the hands of workers across entire industries.

Erin Brockovich (2000)

Julia Roberts portrays the true story of Erin Brockovich, a single mom–turned-paralegal-turned-hero who becomes absorbed in the case of a corporation’s impact on a rural town. After meeting dozens of sick residents of Hinkley, California, she discovers that investor-owned utility Pacific Gas and Electric had been lying for years about the safety of the chemicals seeping from its plant into the groundwater. A legal battle ensues. It’s the perfect triumphant story with that turn-of-the-millennium movie charm—and also happens to be about protecting the public from corporate abuse and environmental hazards. Twenty-five years later, it’s still relevant. (One piece of the journey I find heartwarming and underexplored: Brockovich’s neighbor boyfriend [Aaron Eckhart] providing invaluable childcare while she works on the investigation.) — Aastha

→ Related reads: Check out Roosevelt’s critique of shareholder primacy, explainer on how investor-owned utilities slow down the renewable energy transition, and recent Stacks post on why adequate childcare requires government investment.

For gleeful takedowns of the ultra-wealthy . . .

The Menu (2022)

The Menu is a darkly satirical thriller that addresses wealth disparity through the lens of high-end dining. Set in an exclusive restaurant on a remote island, the film follows a group of ultra-wealthy customers who are forced to confront the consequences of their privilege. As the meticulously crafted courses are served, the evening spirals into a chilling commentary on class divides, exploitation, and the illusion of exclusivity. With sharp writing, pitch-black humor, and a haunting performance by Ralph Fiennes, The Menu turns fine dining into a social critique that exposes dark truths around wealth disparity. — Emily

→ Related reads: See Roosevelt’s work on how taxing billionaires could decrease the concentrated market power of their businesses.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)

Comedy meets murder mystery in Rian Johnson’s vibrant and amusing Glass Onion. When tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) invites a group of his wealthy and influential “friends”—each of whom is indebted to the mogul for one reason or another—to his private Greek island for a weekend-long game, things take a dark, deadly turn. Luckily, Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is on the case. Fast-paced and fun as it is, Glass Onion delves into serious themes of how power, wealth, and human psychology interact with one another in the current political and cultural moment in America. Each of the main characters can be understood as caricatures of all-too-common archetypes surrounding us today—the model and popstar turned lifestyle influencer, the high-powered liberal female state governor, the well-meaning but compromised-by-virtue-of-functioning-in-the-system-as-it-exists scientist, and the jacked and tattooed manosphere Twitch influencer, to name a few. The movie shows the influence, both hard and soft, that Bron wields over each of these characters, demonstrating the ways in which billionaires exert power and control over various players and institutions throughout our society, whether in politics, science, or media. But the genius of Glass Onion comes not from simply drawing attention to the role of billionaires in our system and culture, but rather from showing the utter mediocrity, even sheer stupidity, of those very same billionaires. In doing so, the movie fundamentally challenges the prevailing myth that these moguls are profound geniuses or some byproduct of a just and natural aristocracy—a lesson we’d do well to internalize today. — Shahrzad

→ Related reads: Read from Roosevelt’s Bilal Baydoun on why Elon Musk’s attempt to run the government like a business is a bad idea, and how his attacks on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau set up companies to scam the public freely.

For provoking thought on right-wing cultural politics . . .

Twisters (2024)

Over the summer, you probably saw all the memes of Glen Powell in Twisters: walking through the rain, drenched, in a skin-tight white t-shirt and a cowboy hat. It was masculine, it was very American, and it was fun. Twisters offers an unexpected subversion of traditional gender hierarchies and the stereotypes of rural men through Powell’s character, Tyler Owens. He’s a jacked, white tornado chaser who drives a pickup truck and wears cowboy boots. The fun of the movie partly stems from Owens being a hot guy you can root for—one who evokes the traditional American male archetypes the Right has claimed for far too long—but who isn’t toxic, dismissive of women, and who doesn’t feel entitled to be the one leading the charge. His character evokes many of the things we associate—rightfully or not—with conservatism and regressive views on gender. And yet he is happy to play a supporting role to the brilliance of a female scientist (Daisy Edgar-Jones) in a way that is refreshing to see. Their approach to stopping tornadoes is a neoliberal way of dealing with the climate crisis—which, for the record, is never mentioned in the film—but the villains of the movie are even worse: tech bros. — Katie

→ Related reads: Roosevelt’s Suzanne Kahn wrote about how and why Silicon Valley has embraced MAGA-style misogyny. And check out the first issue of Fed Lit, covering the impact of natural disasters on home insurance and mortgage markets.

The Shape of Water (2017)

Nobody does political criticism under the guise of genre fantasy quite like Guillermo del Toro. The politics of the marginalized are pretty front-and-center in this Cold War–era fairy tale—a disabled woman, a Black woman, and a gay man team up to rescue an unjustly imprisoned foreigner (who happens to be a fish monster) from a J. Edgar Hoover–coded government facility—but on every rewatch I find myself more fascinated with the politics of the primary antagonist. Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon) is your classic all-American family man who should by all accounts be living the authoritarian patriarchal fantasy, but his hollow facade of satisfaction with his creature comforts quickly dissolves to expose the rotten (literally, by the end) core of his worldview. — Katherine

→ Related reads: The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism unpacks the fundamentally unsatisfying cultural project of neoliberalism and the post-neoliberal authoritarian Right’s ability to skillfully harness that dissatisfaction for political gain.

If you ask Eleanor

“I think it is a challenge to the movie industry to make some films that will teach us the workings of our government and our obligations as citizens, and still be as interesting as a mystery film. It can be done but, as far as I know, it never has been done..“

– Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day  (October 19, 1946)