This controversial new film depicts a David-vs.-Goliath fight against Amazon. Here’s what’s preventing you from seeing it

The opening sequence of Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s superlative new documentary “Union” juxtaposes the gruelling early morning commutes of Amazon factory workers with the launch of a rocket ferrying the company’s megabillionaire executive chairman Jeff Bezos into space. It’s a ruefully funny way to visualize the increasingly interstellar distance between haves and have-nots.
“It’s about hubris and detachment” says Story of the film’s overture. “It’s about (Bezos) being so far away that he’s on Mars.”
Following this suggestive — and surreal — introduction, “Union” plunks itself down firmly at ground level. It’s a movie about labour organizing that is itself a gesture of solidarity. Its subjects are the founding members of the Amazon Labor Union, including Chris Smalls, a factory worker who was terminated by the company after organizing a walkout at a Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse in 2021. Less than a year later, the employees of JFK8 Fulfilment Center overcame significant odds — and considerable meddling and intimidation from Amazon itself — to become the first independent Amazon labour union in the United States.
“The most interesting part of making the movie was seeing a small group of workers gathering together out of a desire for something else,” says Story, who teaches at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. (The film will have its local premiere at UofT’s Innis College on Nov. 26, with Story in attendance.)
“While they believed in themselves, according to dominant thinking, they had no reason to think they would be victorious,” Story says. “They had no reason to think a union would better their lives. It’s a moment in history where a lot of people don’t have experience with union membership. What was on display was the yearning to be with other people — to believe that someone had their back, to have somewhere to put their energy with purpose. It feels good to be part of something.”
Few Canadian non-fiction filmmakers are as attuned to the contemporary zeitgeist — and as adept at deconstructing it — as Story, whose previous features “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes” and “The Hottest August” tackled the American prison-industrial complex and the looming spectre of climate change, respectively.
The political thrust and practical daring of Story’s approach is considerable. The same David-vs.-Goliath conditions informing the film’s storyline are reflected in the reluctance of distributors to take it on. A recent feature in The New Yorker described “Union” as a movie “that Hollywood and corporate America don’t want you to see.”
“It’s indicative of a broader problem,” says Story. “When you have a company that dominates every single field and you can’t find a home for a documentary about a historic struggle of labour insurgency, that’s not good.”
The commercial invisibility of “Union” is even more frustrating given the across-the-board success — and armful of Academy Awards — bestowed on Chloe Zhao’s “Nomadland,” which starred Frances McDormand as a seasonal Amazon worker who hits the open road.
In 2017, Story made the documentary short “CamperForce” with Jessica Bruder, author of the book that served as the basis for “Nomadland.” “I’ve been honest with her about my criticisms of (Zhao’s) film,” Story says. “Her book was about how Amazon exploits peoples’ changing needs, and how a new workforce was created out of the 2008 financial crisis because people with pensions and savings had to labour in their old age to make a living. ‘Nomadland’ made me livid because every character in the film is shown optioning into that kind of labour, with a rich relative hiding in the wings, like it’s a lifestyle choice.”
The most telling difference between “Nomadland” and “Union” is that where Zhao and her team sought permission to shoot inside Amazon’s warehouses, Story and Maing made the decision to remain outside the walls. “We didn’t want to compromise our political or artistic integrity with brokered access,” she says. “If we had asked permission, they might have said yes, but it would be on their terms.”
At the same time, “Union” stakes out a fly-on-the-wall perspective via footage gleaned from its subjects, including surreptitious cellphone video of union-busting meetings that drives home the sense of risk in exposing cracks in Amazon’s anodyne public facade.
“We licensed the footage and we’re treating the people who filmed it like colleagues,” says Story. “The images are obscured because the person is nervous and doing something gutsy; they’re trying to hide their own documentation of their experience. That’s what those scenes are about: the mode of expression even more than the content.”
This idea of competing realities — of corporate brainwashing behind closed doors and liberated consciousness beyond them — makes “Union” feel weirdly like a companion piece to the Apple TV+ series “Severance,” whose characters are prevented from remembering anything about their day jobs by nefarious means.
“Workers are so tired that they detach,” Story says. “You’re commuting two or three hours to just get to a 12-hour work shift; it’s boring and tedious work. There’s a mental fog that’s necessary to get through that, and it’s analogous to the chip they put into peoples’ brains in ‘Severance.’”
For all its granular specificity as a document of one very localized labour movement, “Union” is also a richly insinuating work about the bigger picture of technologized consumership and conformity. “Amazon produces empty space too” says Story. “The death of Main Street, the death of family businesses and store fronts — it’s all intensified by their monopoly on consumer items as well as retail options. You have to participate. You have no choice.”
As rousing as parts of “Union” are, it’s a movie that understands — with a mix of frustration and resolve — that even memorable victories like the one won by the ALU are ultimately provisional. It’s a smartly structured doc that’s all the more shapely for being left open-ended.
“I don’t like easy endings,” says Story. “I want us to be unsettled by things that we watch, and to have unsettled feelings that are productive. Can the movie live in your brain and not be over? Does it make you want to talk to other people? Does it start growing tentacles?”
Story says she’s looking forward to showing “Union” at Innis College and to what should be a lively Q&A session with audience members (including, likely, a number of her students). And she hopes the screening is not a one-shot deal for a film that wears its convictions on its sleeve.
“I’m a Canadian filmmaker who has almost always worked in Canada,” she says. “I’ve never had a Canadian distributor. I’ve never been hired for a job in the industry or even really approached. Like any project, you want to be able to bring it home and to show your friends and family, and for it to live outside of you.”