UT Lecturer Anne Lewis on her new doc, A Strike and an Uprising (in Texas)
By Richard Whittaker
As a documentarian and teacher, Anne Lewis is synonymous with two things: Austin (her adopted home since the Nineties) and films about trade union activism. She concedes that it’s a little bit strange that her new film A Strike and an Uprising (in Texas) is the first to explore labor in the Lone Star State. The documentary, which screens this weekend in Austin as part of the Cine Las Americas International Film Festival, is a follow-up of sorts to the UT lecturer’s 2007 film, Morristown: In the Air and Sun. In that film, she found commonalities in the experiences of workers in Eastern Tennessee, interior Mexico, and Ciudad Juárez, exploring links that geography cannot erase. Here, she connects two periods of labor activism in Texas: the 1938 San Antonio pecan shellers’ strike, and the 1987 Jobs With Justice march in Nacogdoches (plus, as a coda, the 2017 protests against Confederate memorials). Lewis said, “In retrospect, it was random that those two stories were two things I would be interested in … but there was something in them that just got me.”
Read full article here: https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2018-05-04/workers-of-the-world-united-in-time/
