Work Films

Portrait of Albert "Hap" Collins of South Blue Hill, Maine. Hap Collins was a poet, painter, fiddler, lobster fisherman, storyteller, and craftsman.

A behind the scenes look to see how the magic of the midway comes together, town after town, and how carnies create a community and way of life that transcends place and time.

A 1973 film of Alex Stewart, a mountain craftsman from near Sneedville, Tennessee, constructing a churn. Film includes discussion of the use of non-powered tools and skills handed…

Eastern Kentucky's Morgan Sexton cut his first banjo out of the bottom of a lard bucket, and some seventy years later won the National Endowment for the Arts' National Heritage…

We Are Arabbers follows the horse-and-wagon produce vendors along the streets of Baltimore, Maryland as they struggle to make a living and maintain their unique culture.

This 22 minute documentary follows the ten workers of Broerman Poultry Processing, revealing their surprisingly close relationships, despite the gruesome nature of their job. The…

The Amish keep surprising their technology-programmed neighbors by keeping alive ways and beliefs that many modern Americans wish they could recapture. Mennonite historian John…

Pete and Toshi Seeger, their son Daniel, and folklorist Bruce Jackson visited a Texas prison in Huntsville in March of 1966 and produced this rare document of of work songs by…

A documentary about lettercutting, in both monumental inscriptions and on gravestones. The filmmakers were given complete access over a two year period to the work of the…

This 1986 film examines the traditional Native American craft of split ash basketmaking as a means of economic and cultural survival for Aroostook Micmac Indians of northern…

Ben Thresher's mill is one of the few water-powered, wood-working mills left in this country. Operating in rural Vermont since 1848, the mill is a unique link between the age of…

John E. "Frail" Joines was a master tale teller from Wilkes County, N. C., on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His hunting tales, stories from World War II, and…

The gifted African American storyteller Louise Anderson (1921-1994) tells her family stories and folk tales, and recites poetry in this film taped in Jacksonville, North Carolina,…

Born in the coalfields of eastern Kentucky, Gunning suffered a life of bitter poverty which became the fuel for dozens of moving songs about working people, the mines, and the…