"The Women of Brukman"

I consider every film I make a seed that will grow in the world. I can see how things could be better, and I'm very commited to sharing these ideas. I believe that we can change the world if we learn from each other. The Women of Brukman is a wonderful, inspiring story about persevering and triumphing over the system.

Can workers do something else than manual labour in a factory? For instance, administrate it? This is a philosophical question. In 2000 and 2002, I was shooting my film Money in Argentina, where I met the women of Brukman. Observing these women discovering their talents and their political voices in the middle of their country's economic meltdown was truly moving. They were among the displaced and cheated workers suffering all over Argentina, but, instead of giving up and going home, they took matters into their own hands. Who would have ever thought that a group of underpaid and unhappy workers could start a cooperative revolution that is still strong today?

My first idea was to include them in Money, showing their story as part of the solution to the crisis. The women liked the idea. So I started to film. After a few days, I saw that this subject could be a film by itself. They were asking expropriation of the factory and to form a cooperative in a world where privatizing was the trend. Could it happen? This was a big question and an inspirational turning point for me.

Over many years, I followed these courageous women and their struggle to get the operation running again as a cooperative. Their expulsion from the factory, months of battling to get it back, and tangles with the law. I saw them as individuals finding a way to put dignity into their working lives.

I tried to write the history of a change happening right before my very eyes. I witnessed that change in power structure: neighborhood and inter-neighborhood assemblies replaced corrupt and fallen governments. When governments lose their legitimacy, mutiny becomes necessary. Argentineans exercised that right by reinventing their local economy and by occupying abandoned factories.

When the Brukman women did this, they unwittingly started a movement in Argentina that has led to more than 20,000 workers forming cooperatives to run more than 200 formerly abandoned businesses. This is unique. The women of Brukman not only managed to run a large business successfully with no previous experience or education, but somehow they also summoned up the will to unite against a government that rewarded corruption and the ruthless exploitation of workers. In this context, their struggle and eventual triumph seems even more extraordinary.

I first got interested in co-ops when I was living in Turkey in the '70s. The cooperative movement was very strong at that time. I started filming the struggle of a co-op of seven villages. They were located arround a lake, but the villagers did not have the right to fish in it because it was the property of a single man. Yet, according to the Turkish constitution, nobody could own a lake; it was public property. I wanted to write their inspring story with my camera. Unfortunately, I had to move to Canada. Almost 30 years later, I got my second chance to address this issue, in Argentina with The Women of Brukman. -MPM

Photo courtesy of the filmmaker.