Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

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.

Ricky, a Newcastle man who needs work, buys a van to become a 'self-employed' franchise delivery driver. His wife Abby, a home-care worker, sells her car to help pay for it. The film follows a family as the gig model eats their time, then their kids' lives. Written by Paul Laverty.

Why it’s here: The film shows how a contract that calls you your own boss moves all the risk onto you. What's punk is that it refuses a villain you can punch: the system does the work. What's pedagogical is the mechanics: fines, unpaid hours, who owns the van. Pairs with Nickel and Dimed and Bullshit Jobs. A hard watch for parents.