Event

H-2 WORKER

Shot guerilla-style over the course of two years, H-2 WORKER is an unmissable document of pre-NAFTA neoliberalism, made at a time when over ten thousand Jamaican men per year were coming to toil in the sugarcane fields of Florida. (The filmmaker herself appears with her back to the camera, when the crew is not-so-subtly advised to cease shooting at one of the company stores where laborers can buy snacks, toothpaste, etc.) Aided by legendary cinematographer Mayrse Alberti (Creed, Crumb), H-2 WORKER captures a microcosm of indentured servitude: dimly lit dormitories, dusk-to-dawn shifts, brutal deductions in pay from both the sugar company side (and upon remittance to Jamaica.)

While the beyond-cheap labor is defended by sundry American executives as a lucky break for Jamaicas depressed economy the opposite of a handout cane harvesters inevitably begin organizing for the purposes of work stoppage. With heartbreaking snatches from letters written by the workers to their families back home, Blacks debut exposé wears its advocating spirit on its sleeve, brazenly appealing for a change in the status quo in classic advocacy-doc style. The H-2 program was ultimately disbanded after a fifty-million-dollar class-action lawsuit, but the films contemporary pertinence speaks for itself: the wages offered these men are paltry to the point of destitution, but theyre working a job with no real claimants on the U.S. side. Sound familiar?

H-2 WORKER does not pretend to offer any answers, but it solidly frames issues about the economy, employment and the treatment of workers who seem just steps away from slavery. Caryn James, The New York Times

GRAND JURY PRIZE WINNER 1990 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL