The Making of the English Working Class

Britain, 1984. A group of London lesbian and gay activists decides the striking coal miners being crushed by the Thatcher government are fighting the same enemy they are, and starts raising money for a Welsh mining village. The village doesn't know what to make of them, and the feeling is mutual. Based on a true story.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the alliance: two groups that had every social reason to stay apart chose solidarity on the strength of a shared opponent, and the film lets the awkwardness, the prejudice and the first dance-floor thaw all play out on screen. The pedagogy is in how organizing actually works. Coalitions get built through food, favors and showing up, not through agreeing on everything, and the film makes that feel like something a viewer could do. It is a crowd-pleasing dramatization, so some characters and events are composited or invented, and it is worth reading up on the real Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign afterward.

Laurent Amédéo leads 1,100 workers at the Perrin plant — a facility that is profitable, whose multinational parent company has decided to close anyway. Stéphane Brizé shoots En guerre with the grain and rhythm of a documentary: non-professional actors in most roles, a handheld camera that can't find a comfortable distance, meetings that go nowhere for a very long time. Vincent Lindon is the union spokesperson who has to translate collective fury into procedure and back again, day after day. The film covers one stretch of a fight that most films would compress into a montage — the press conferences, the back-channel negotiations, the vote counts, the waiting.

Why it’s here: Brizé makes you sit in the room where a decision is being made about other people's lives by people who will never meet them. What's punk about En guerre is the refusal to let that feel abstract — the camera stays at plant-gate level, in the meeting room, on Laurent's face when the call comes in. What's pedagogical is the film's insistence on duration: you feel what it costs to keep a collective together when the institution on the other side is patient and the workers are not. For anyone who has been told that workers in France are just wired differently, that solidarity at this scale isn't something available to us — this film shows the material conditions that make it possible. And it shows what it costs even there.