The Reel Work May Day Labor Film Festival takes place in California's central coast communities in and around Santa Cruz each year during the week of May First, International Workers Day.
Reel Work presents cultural events, bringing together award-winning documentary film producers, workers, activists, students, and the public with the goal of increasing community awareness of the central role of work in our lives, to discuss economic and global justice issues, and to bring alive the history and culture of the labor movement in the US and abroad. We highlight how workers and community members band together in united effort for mutual benefit to achieve justice and dignity in the streets, fields, and workshops.
Cinematic representations of labor each year include local and international works, world premieres as well as classics. We inspire festival participants to join in the struggle for worker rights locally, nationally and globally to achieve social justice and international solidarity.
An outpouring of generous cash and in-kind contributions from labor, business and community sponsors allows Reel Work to maintain its admission policy of voluntary donation at the door and support the type of independent documentary filmmaking that we have brought to the big screen since 2002.