Ji.hlava 2026: ‘Workers ‘80’ and ‘Union Town’ Put Labor Front and Center
Labor movements and independent documentaries are inherently tied at the hip. Without the collective efforts by those without financial means contesting the popular narrative of those who possess them, the media would be (and as we know, often is) in dire and one-note straits. This dynamic is true regardless of the political system in place; whether it is a private corporation or a state industry calling the shots, the mythological battle between the serfs and the lords has ancient roots.
Both sides of the coin were visible in Jihlava, Czechia this past week, for the 30th iteration of its International Documentary Film Festival (Ji.hlava IDFF), which programmed a 1981 retrospective of a shipyard worker solidarity movement in Gdańsk, Poland a few days apart from a 2026 documentary about delivery drivers in New York City. The latter being made by legendary American filmmaker Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, USA [1976]) is of no small import, but the essentially one-off collaborative project by Andrzej Chodakowski and Andrzej Zajaczkowski is long overdue for its roses.
WORKERS ‘80
“I think the working class is competent enough to have an opinion.”
The careful arbitration presented in Workers '80 was in fact a minor revolution. The Polish Solidarnosc (Solidarity) movement that the documentary covers was born at the fittingly named Lenin Shipyard, whose port sits in the south Baltic Sea, about a two-hour drive east from Russia's Kaliningrad. The two directors named Andrzej, along with nine other credited cinematographers, picked up their lenses to capture the final week of a process that began in September 1980: the establishment of the first trade union to be recognized among Warsaw Pact countries.
In case you need a refresher on Polish history, it’s important to know that many of their countrymen spent the better part of the 20th century fighting off occupation by the Germans and the Soviets. Historically, their rebellion is very strongly linked to the Catholic faith, which also played a role in their labor movement. Chodakowski and Zajaczkowski (et. al) primarily set their cameras on the negotiations between the Inter-Factory Strike Committee (in Polish, the MKS), led by Lech Wałęsa, and the local branch of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) during the regime of First Secretary Stanisław Kania.
What you should know about labor in Poland until then was that, despite the Soviet Union’s facade of industrial worker empowerment, its leadership typically acted aggressively against grassroots movements. During the deliberations, the MKS points to an incident from December 1970, when shipyard workers elected to strike against proposed commodity price increases and a denial of Christmas bonuses. Tensions escalated, and by the third day, almost the entire city was mobilized in the unrest.
Around 500 people were arrested and the government ordered a military blockade. In Gdańsk proper, at least two people died, according to official reports, but fighting spread across the country. Much higher casualties were reported in Szczecin, near the modern German border, with re-evaluated figures estimating around 7000 fatalities over its five days of fighting. Gdansk was the breeding ground for another similar incident that took place in June 1976.
Along with wage increase guarantees and the right to freedom of expression, the re-hiring of those fired during these previous strikes was one of the items in the MKS’ 21 Demands, a document of rights which would soon be heard around the world. Once the agreement with the government had been reached, Polish workers celebrated by taking communion (Polish-born Pope John Paul II’s endorsement of the movement was crucial to their success) and cheering on their charismatic, mustachioed leader.
The observational 90-minute edit of the footage produced was not permitted to be screened for general audiences in Poland, but someone managed to sneak it out to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RLE) in West Germany, who then distributed it to an estimated 4.1 million people over the course of 1981. It was given an award by the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) after screening in Lille, France.
Alas, progress is not linear: martial law was established in Poland at the end of that same year. According to Ji.hlava, Zajączkowski was fired from the Documentary Film Studio in Warsaw upon this decree, but after some years he ended up back in Prague, where he had previously attended film school in the 1960s. As for Chodakowski, he went on to assist the Solidarity movement with its union relations in Italy through 1989, and as an ambassador in the post-independence government.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990, Wałęsa served as the first popularly elected president, which makes the imagery of his deliberation that much more valuable for the modern Polish nation-state. Workers ‘80 is in many ways a model procedural documentary, and is fortunately no longer lost to time: you can find it in the supplementary materials of a film box set for Andrzej Wajda, who used some of the footage in his narrative interpretation of the events, Man of Iron (1981).
Union Town
“You’re leveraging Santa.”
“I think Santa would be pretty disgusted with what Amazon has been doing these past few years.”
Kopple yet again places the American dream under a harsh light in Union Town, a labor documentary set not in a coal-mining town in Kentucky, or a meatpacking plant in Texas (see: American Dream [1990]), but the international business capital of the Big Apple. The industry being scrutinized this time around is one made unfortunately ubiquitous by the Covid-19 pandemic: delivery. From 2023-2025, workers from the United Postal Service (UPS), Amazon and Doordash united with their respective teamsters to protest their poor pay and lack of hazard coverage.
Among the accusations leveled, the most heinous are the conditions described by migrant workers of Doordash, who were at one point having their hard-earned tips entirely appropriated by the company, and the revelation that Amazon uses some 300,000 independent contractors to avoid liability for their employment. Kopple gives a voice to a Bengali motorcyclist afflicted by a terrible car accident, a Colombian man frequently left out to dry without shifts, and a man who lives in his car to get some sleep between daytime and nighttime shifts.
While the scabs of today look a little different under the accountability of perpetual surveillance tools, corporations do indeed pay high fees for union busting firms and spin doctors to weaponize the media and discourage workers from fighting back. In one particularly effective moment of visual irony, Kopple captures Amazon suits plugging a revolving door to keep upset employees from coming in.
Though the glossy showreel of 2026 workers’ testimonies may feel redundant at times, one can only imagine how redundant it feels to barely eke out a living in a city as supposedly progressive as New York. It’s also a good reminder to privileged audiences who might have come to view instant delivery as an inherent convenience and right. Kopple has long known where the class gaps lie, and she also knows how the pandemic made it worse. Ji.hlava paid tribute to her with a retrospective screening of Harlan County, USA.
Union Town premiered at Venice Film Festival in September and will be screened at DOC NYC later this month.
Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival took place from October 23 to November 1, 2026. Its identity as a collective, dialogue-focused event is bolstered by its origin as an event put on by high schoolers; it now stands as one of the most important documentary forums in the Czech Republic.
-Lydia
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