Strike at Cork Film Festival

The artist Anthony Haughey has taken an interesting tack to commemorate the centenary of the 1913 Dublin Lockout, as part of a strand at this year’s Cork Film Festival. He’s put together a programme of films that celebrate workers’ rights from around the world.

His selection includes Eisenstein’s film Strike; a documentary about the impact of global trade on communities entitled The Forgotten Space, which, as its narrator explains, tells “the unlikely story of a steel box that changed the world trading system”; as well as a fascinating selection of mainly strike-based documentaries.

The choice of the National Sculpture Factory to screen the festival-within-a-festival is apt. The factory’s 30ft-high screen will, for example, capture well the epic scale of Eisenstein’s Strike, the Russian filmmaker’s debut feature about a workers’ strike and its savage suppression.