The road “it’s an honor to simply be nominated” is a cliche, but it surely’s definitely 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 employees as they launch—and win—the first-ever union campaign on the retail big, there’s a narrative in the truth that they weren’t nominated.
When the artistic workforce behind Union first embedded with Amazon Staten Island warehouse employees in 2020, they weren’t trying to make a buzzy, business movie. They raised their full price range earlier than the Amazon Labor Union even gained 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 individuals are politicized by work,” lengthy earlier than it was clear simply how massive the story would grow to be.
However then they had been there to seize that win, they usually 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 movie star—heading to the White Home and onto the Day by day Present and because the topic of main media protection. And it appeared like their documentary might truly be marketable—and massive. They premiered at Sundance 2024, and gained the pageant’s U.S. Documentary Particular Jury Award for the Artwork of Change. “We actually felt like there wasn’t a purpose 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 would possibly.
Distributors didn’t clamor to select it up, although. In actual fact, the filmmakers bought move after move. “Not even ‘we’re ready to see’ or ‘it’s a gentle move’ or simply not listening to again, however exhausting no’s, comparatively rapidly,” Curley says. So that they pivoted to an impartial 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 usually 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 employees, and screened the movie close to Amazon warehouses. They did a web based rental launch the place viewers might donate in order that an Amazon employee might watch the movie free of charge.
On this approach, 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 programs actually work for. Curley says not one of the massive distributions truly even mentioned 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 an even bigger wave of organizing going down. Across the similar time, Apple retail employees started organizing (and bought 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 individuals 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 the event you’re studying the movie that approach, it’s undoubtedly 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.
Although the movie itself focuses on Amazon, it gives a broad perspective of the labor motion at massive. “It’s fairly insular to this group of Amazon organizers in Staten Island,” Curley says, “however we labored actually exhausting 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 grow to be 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 Characteristic Oscar nominations. “We had been actually lucky to have such robust assist and steering throughout the awards marketing campaign, and perception that the movie might actually be within the dialog,” Curley says. Being shortlisted did enhance the movie’s visibility, enhance its impartial distribution path, and provides the members some validation, she provides, for on a regular basis they dedicated to the mission.
“It might have been cool and a unique journey to have been nominated,” she provides, however not being nominated “permits us to proceed to stability the sort of status of the movie with the actual collective effort and wrestle to get the movie on the market.” (The movie’s artistic workforce, together with Curley, consists of 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 approach. An Oscars look can look like an ending: a grand end result of effort. However Union’s story isn’t over. The workforce is already serious about its subsequent section of distribution, and has plans tied to Could Day and Labor Day. It’s outdoors of the awards circuit, and so can inform its story past awards season. “Now we simply get to be a movie that’s making an attempt to achieve audiences,” Curley says.
Amazon employees’ struggle isn’t over both; greater than two years after unionizing, they nonetheless don’t have a contract. (Employees approved a strike on the end of 2024 as a part of its efforts to get the retail big 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 employees rights, and the ability of collective organizing. The movie would possibly give attention to Amazon, however actually it highlights this dichotomy, she notes, of how “organizing is crucial and in addition inconceivable.”
The movie exhibits the Staten Island warehouse win, sure, but in addition 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 yet one more marketing campaign at a warehouse in California. “It’s this concept of, we simply spend time with this small personnel, and [this is] going to be occurring with employees at each firm and each a part of the world,” Curley says, “and that being inspiring and daunting.”
