The road “it’s an honor to only be nominated” is a cliche, but it surely’s actually true that touchdown an Oscar nomination comes with status, consideration, and plenty of award-season press protection on the tales behind each movie. However for Union, a documentary movie that follows the historic efforts of a gaggle of Amazon warehouse staff as they launch—and win—the first-ever union campaign on the retail large, there’s a narrative in the truth that they weren’t nominated.
When the inventive crew behind Union first embedded with Amazon Staten Island warehouse staff in 2020, they weren’t trying to make a buzzy, industrial movie. They raised their full price range earlier than the Amazon Labor Union even received its election. They had been dedicated, producer Samantha Curley says, to “documenting this explicit labor wrestle, and asking questions in regards to the fashionable workforce and the way persons are politicized by work,” lengthy earlier than it was clear simply how huge the story would turn into.
However then they had been there to seize that win, and so they had been prepared with years of footage of Chris Smalls, the marketing campaign’s intrepid chief, earlier than he grew to become an in a single day labor celeb—heading to the White Home and onto the Each day Present and because the topic of main media protection. And it appeared like their documentary may really be marketable—and massive. They premiered at Sundance 2024, and received the competition’s U.S. Documentary Particular Jury Award for the Artwork of Change. “We actually felt like there wasn’t a motive that it wouldn’t get picked up or distributed,” Curley says. They knew Amazon’s streaming service wouldn’t purchase the movie, after all, however they figured different locations may.
Distributors didn’t clamor to choose it up, although. In truth, the filmmakers acquired move after move. “Not even ‘we’re ready to see’ or ‘it’s a mushy move’ or simply not listening to again, however arduous no’s, comparatively rapidly,” Curley says. So that they pivoted to an unbiased self launch, partnering with 250 labor organizations and affinity teams to display the movie for one evening or restricted runs in additional than 20 cities. These screenings typically offered out, that means Union was the highest-grossing movie for the theaters on these nights. They held showings adopted by Q&As with Amazon Labor Union staff, and screened the movie close to Amazon warehouses. They did a web-based rental launch the place viewers may donate in order that an Amazon employee may watch the movie without cost.
On this means, Union’s distribution grew to become a narrative in itself, mirroring the one the movie instructed—in regards to the energy of organizing, how a small group of individuals could make a big effect, and who institutional techniques actually work for. Curley says not one of the huge distributions really even stated something about Amazon. “What we gathered, that was by no means explicitly acknowledged, was that it was actually about labor,” she says.
The Amazon Labor Union was only one a part of a much bigger wave of organizing going down. Across the identical time, Apple retail staff started organizing (and acquired their first contract in 2024), as did Disney park characters (who voted to unionize in 2024). Main actions from the United AutoWorkers, Hollywood actors and writers, and extra dominated the news cycle of the previous few years. “This concept of the labor motion and employee energy is so related and threatening that, I feel—and once more, this wasn’t ever explicitly acknowledged—however what we took from these conversations [with distributors] was like, these distributors don’t need folks pointing the finger at them any moreso than they already are,” Curley says.
Typically, some had been additionally shying away from “political” content material—although Curley doesn’t assume that Union, or the expertise of watching it, is overtly political. “In case you’re studying the movie that means, it’s positively current, however I feel the movie is about group initiatives, and in regards to the audacious perception that we are able to make something higher, or we are able to change something about our circumstances,” she says.
Regardless that the movie itself focuses on Amazon, it presents a broad perspective of the labor motion at giant. “It’s fairly insular to this group of Amazon organizers in Staten Island,” Curley says, “however we labored actually arduous to remind viewers this is only one small a part of this enormous machine.” The timing of the movie speaks to this as nicely: it’s not a 10-year retrospective of a historic second, however got here out amid an ongoing labor resurgence. “We wished the movie to turn into a part of the dialog about the way forward for work and labor organizing.”
In any case that effort, Union did handle to get shortlisted for the Finest Documentary Function Oscar nominations. “We had been actually lucky to have such robust help and steerage inside the awards marketing campaign, and perception that the movie may actually be within the dialog,” Curley says. Being shortlisted did improve the movie’s visibility, increase its unbiased distribution path, and provides the members some validation, she provides, for on a regular basis they dedicated to the challenge.
“It might have been cool and a unique journey to have been nominated,” she provides, however not being nominated “permits us to proceed to steadiness the form of status of the movie with the true collective effort and wrestle to get the movie on the market.” (The movie’s inventive crew, together with Curley, contains producer Mars Verrone, cinematographer and producer Martin Dicicco, administrators Stephen Maing and Brett Story, editors Blair McClendon and Malika Zouhali-Worrall, and composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe.)
It’s additionally a possibility for the movie to maintain paving its personal means. An Oscars look can look like an ending: a grand end result of effort. However Union’s story isn’t over. The crew is already eager about its subsequent part of distribution, and has plans tied to Might Day and Labor Day. It’s exterior of the awards circuit, and so can inform its story past awards season. “Now we simply get to be a movie that’s attempting to succeed in audiences,” Curley says.
Amazon staff’ combat isn’t over both; greater than two years after unionizing, they nonetheless don’t have a contract. (Employees licensed a strike on the end of 2024 as a part of its efforts to get the retail large to barter.) And the bigger dialog about labor isn’t ending both; although the Trump administration is taking steps to dismantle the labor motion and erase employee energy, these threats are additionally bolstering conversations in regards to the significance of staff rights, and the facility of collective organizing. The movie may concentrate on Amazon, however actually it highlights this dichotomy, she notes, of how “organizing is important and in addition not possible.”
The movie reveals the Staten Island warehouse win, sure, but additionally how the Amazon Labor Union misplaced its subsequent two elections, and the way infighting and burnout begin to seem among the many organizers. It ends by exhibiting the very beginnings of one more marketing campaign at a warehouse in California. “It’s this concept of, we simply spend time with this small team of workers, and [this is] going to be taking place with staff at each firm and each a part of the world,” Curley says, “and that being inspiring and daunting.”
