Women Metalworkers

In the late seventies, a group of Brazilian documentary filmmakers traveled to the ABC region in the suburbs of São Paulo with the purpose of recording a wave of worker strikes taking place in response to the negligence of the increasingly powerful and abusive automotive industry. Documenting striking women metal workers, Olga Futemma and Renato Tapajós’ Trabalhadoras Metalúrgicas is a particularly vigorous work among the films produced during this moment in São Paulo worker history. Scenes filmed during the first Congress of Metallurgical Women of São Bernardo and Diadema in 1978 are intercut with images documenting the appalling working conditions against which the women featured in the congress were striking.