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The Take (2003)

Director: avi lewis

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From Time Out London

Grown men cry a lot in ‘The Take’, a documentary by husband and wife activists Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein (‘No Logo’). In fact, it’s the tears and rare moments of euphoria that make this film – which at times resembles a sixth form media studies project – so compelling. It’s shot in Argentina, which once boasted the most prosperous middle class in Latin America, but ten years of IMF policies, as enforced by President Carlos Menem, have left a legacy of closed factories and liquidated assets. Today more than half of all Argentineans live in poverty. The focus is on a nationwide movement whereby workers occupy closed factories and reopen them under their own terms. Freddy Espinoza’s story is typical: he hasn’t worked since the closure of the Forja Auto Parts factory three years ago and now has to juggle paying the bills against feeding the kids (‘they don’t even remember what a MacDonald’s Happy Meal is,’ his wife laments). There’s little macroeconomic analysis here, and the shots of happy employees in new worker-operated schools, clinics and factories resemble a Stalinist propaganda film filled with beaming peasants extolling the virtues of the Five-Year Plan. But we are offered an intimacy with subjects whose lives and emotions are not black and white, such as a pro-Menem Forja worker. Freddy himself calls on his colleagues to support the occupation not with an ideological rallying cry, but with the simple plea that his family can’t afford to eat – plus, of course, a few tears. Neither slick nor sophisticated, but inspiring nonetheless.

Author: RT

Time Out London Issue 1813: May 11-18 2005

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