Best movies like Sister Stella L.

Mary Rafferty comes from a poor family of steel mill workers in 19th Century Pittsburgh. Her family objects when she goes to work as a maid for the wealthy Scott family which controls the mill. Mary catches the attention of handsome scion Paul Scott, but their romance is complicated by Paul's engagement to someone else and a bitter strike among the mill workers.

By the start of World War II, Paul Robeson had given up his lucrative mainstream work to participate in more socially progressive film and stage productions. Robeson committed his support to Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz’s political semidocumentary Native Land. With Robeson’s narration and songs, this beautifully shot and edited film exposes violations of Americans’ civil liberties and is a call to action for exploited workers around the country. Scarcely shown since its debut, Native Land represents Robeson’s shift from narrative cinema to the leftist documentaries that would define the final chapter of his controversial film career.

A fictionalized account of the first major successful sexual harassment case in the United States -- Jenson vs. Eveleth Mines, where a woman who endured a range of abuse while working as a miner filed and won the landmark 1984 lawsuit.

In 1969, an administrator runs against the corrupt president of the United Coal Miners Union, and becomes the target of a murder plot.

When workers at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota are asked to take a substantial pay cut in a highly profitable year, the local labor union decides to go on strike and fight for a wage they believe is fair. But as the work stoppage drags on and the strikers face losing everything, friends become enemies, families are divided and the very future of this typical mid American town is threatened.

William Castle directed this Sam Katzman production, a gritty crime thriller about a newly-discharged sailor who gets a job as a longshoreman in The Big Easy. He swiftly discovers mob corruption throughout the docks, and when a friend is killed by the gangsters, he convinces the police to let him go undercover and take matters into his own hands. Filmed on location on the docks and in the French Quarter.

Set in the 1980s, an American journalist covering the Salvadoran Civil War becomes entangled with both the leftist guerrilla groups and the right-wing military dictatorship while trying to rescue his girlfriend and her children.

Filmed in the coal country of West Virginia, "Matewan" celebrates labor organizing in the context of a 1920s work stoppage. Union organizer, Joe Kenehan, a scab named "Few Clothes" Johnson and a sympathetic mayor and police chief heroically fight the power represented by a coal company and Matewan's vested interests so that justice and workers' rights need not take a back seat to squalid working conditions, exploitation and the bottom line.

Johnny Kovak joins the Teamsters trade-union in a local chapter in the 1930s and works his way up in the organization. As he climbs higher and higher his methods become more ruthless and finally senator Madison starts a campaign to find the truth about the alleged connections with the Mob.

At New Mexico's Empire Zinc mine, Mexican-American workers protest the unsafe work conditions and unequal wages compared to their Anglo counterparts. Ramon Quintero helps organize the strike, but he is shown to be a hypocrite by treating his pregnant wife, Esperanza, with a similar unfairness. When an injunction stops the men from protesting, however, the gender roles are reversed, and women find themselves on the picket lines while the men stay at home.

A rookie assistant DA is assigned to investigate the murder of a longshoreman, killed for exposing gangster involvement on the piers, and meets up with a "code of silence" amongst all potential witnesses.

It’s 2017 in Bisbee, Arizona, an old copper-mining town just miles from the Mexican border. The town’s close-knit community prepares to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bisbee’s darkest hour: the infamous Bisbee Deportation of 1917, during which 1,200 striking miners were violently taken from their homes, banished to the middle of the desert, and left to die. Townspeople confront this violent, misunderstood past by staging dramatic recreations of the escalating strike. These dramatized scenes are based on subjective versions of the story and “directed,” in a sense, by residents with conflicting views of the event. Deeply personal segments torn from family history build toward a massive restaging of the deportation itself on the exact day of its 100th anniversary.

Naive Stanley Windrush returns from the war, his mind set on a successful career in business. Much to his own dismay, he soon finds he has to start from the bottom and work his way up, and also that the management as well as the trade union use him as a tool in their fight for power.

This film documents the coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastovers refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk. Director Barbara Kopple puts the strike into perspective by giving us some background on the historical plight of the miners and some history of the UMWA.

In 1984, a group of LGBT activists decide to raise money to support the National Union of Mineworkers during their lengthy strike. There is only one problem: the Union seems embarrassed to receive their support.

In a crowded, multi-appartment house, a young student peeps on his neighbours making love and subsequently develops a steamy affair with the neighbour's wife. The affair slowly becomes an obsession and spins out of control.

A Bajau midwife copes with the irony of her own infertility amid the deprivations of her gypsy community in Tawi-Tawi. A saga of island life stuck between the devil of passion and the deep blue sea of tradition.

A young woman recalls how her father (a fallen priest), her mother (a woman with a secret past) and her teenage sister returned with her to live in their ancestral home after the family business failed. She was plagued with mysterious problems of sleepwalking and began a romance with a young man who tried to cure her.

After the relatively low box office takings of 'Intolerance', D. W. Griffith would revisit his epic film three years later by releasing two of the film's interlocking stories as standalone features, with some new additional footage. The second of these was 'The Mother and the Law', which demonstrates how crime, moral puritanism, and conflicts between ruthless capitalists and striking workers help ruin the lives of marginal Americans.

A power-mad union boss resorts to murder to eliminate witnesses scheduled to testify against him. The eclectic cast includes Mickey Rooney, Mamie Van Doren, Mel Torme, Jay North, Vampira, Charles Chaplin Jr., Jackie Coogan and Norman Grabowski.

The story is about a privileged young man named Al who kills a teenage girl, Belinda. He seeks a hiding place, and the sanctuary is given by Julius, a friend who is a pimp in a whorehouse. While in the whorehouse, Al takes his enjoyment of one prostitute, Cita. One day, a woman named Isabel comes to the brothel and starts to work there. Al falls for the newcomer which angers Cita.

During the Chinese Revolution in 1949, young Chinese copra trader named Fong-Huan marries Elisa, a young and pretty Filipina. The couples children, Daniel and Linda, were raised in a mixture of Chinese and Filipino-Hispanic tradition. These richly cultured people are the ancestors of a dysfunctional third-generation family whose daughters tell their own stories of joy, struggle, and the complex realities in the life of Filipino Chinese families.

The film concerns the attempts of Fidel to resume a normal life after the devastation wrought by his wife's death. He returns to his old friend Crispin and wife Irene. A tentative effort with another woman fails, and Fidel finds himself in Irene's arms. That same evening a young girl is brutally murdered. Fidel, unable to account for his whereabouts, is named the principal suspect, which later leads to his imprisonment. Crispin, meanwhile, learns of Irene's infidelity; his friendship is put to the test when Fidel escapes, gets wounded, and asks Crispin to kill him and put him out of misery.

A laborer gets money for his wife's pregnancy from his boss on the condition that he will not join the union.

Romance and heartbreak walk hand-in-hand when Philip Chagal accidentally meets Helen Lawrence in a restaurant where she is a waitress. Unhappily married to a woman who suffers from mental illness, he is attracted to her and they make a date to go sailing, arriving at Philip's country home just as a storm is breaking. Helen learns who he is for the first time, a celebrated-and-famous concert pianist and, falling in love with him, decides to leave before matters go further. A hurricane hits and their car is crippled by a falling tree. Rising water forces then to seek shelter in the choir loft of a church, where they spend the night.

The firebrand reporter, feminist and philanthropist Dorothy Day co-founds The Catholic Worker with Peter Maurin, an eccentric philosopher.

A Kentucky woman whose mine-worker husband is nearly killed in a cave-in, and whose father is slowly dying of black lung disease, joins the picket lines for a long, violent strike.

A mother and her daughter—who are both victims of incest-rape perpetrated by the same man now languishing in jail—are approached by a couple of filmmakers with an offer to produce a movie based on the two women’s true story. They hesitate on the idea at first but agree eventually for the sum of money they will be paid in exchange for selling the rights to the material. When the finished film is finally shown in theaters, they proceed to the city all the way from their hometown to catch the screening. They are elated at the prospect of seeing the larger-than-life versions of themselves. But as the motion picture gradually unfolds before their very eyes, they instead go through another harrowing experience of a lifetime.

Dolores Huerta bucks 1950s gender conventions by starting the country's first farm worker's union with fellow organizer Cesar Chavez. What starts out as a struggle for racial and labor justice, soon becomes a fight for gender equality within the same union she is eventually forced to leave. As she wrestles with raising 11 children, three marriages, and is nearly beaten to death by a San Francisco tactical police squad, Dolores emerges with a vision that connects her new found feminism with racial and class justice.

Anton, a wealthy logger marries Serafina, a woman from the slums of Manila. They move to Anton's house on a tropical island where they live with Anton's domineering and disapproving mother.

A women's prison on a tropical island is a hellhole where the inmates are raped, tortured and otherwise abused by the evil commandant and brutal guards. However, one of the guards falls in love with a beautiful inmate, and decides to help her and all the other prisoners escape.

A biography of the civil-rights activist and labor organizer Cesar Chavez. Chronicling the birth of a modern American labour movement, Cesar Chavez tells the story of the famed civil rights leader and labour organiser torn between his duties as a husband and father and his commitment to securing a living wage for farm workers. Passionate but soft-spoken, Chavez embraced non-violence as he battled greed and prejudice in his struggle to bring dignity to working people.

A poor Filipino woman (Assunta de Rossi) tries to take care of her mentally handicapped sister amid the poverty and violence of the shantytown in which they live.

A ham-handed cautionary fable against communism, the film concerns a group of Civil War veterans who are appalled by the burgeoning radical movement in America.

Documentary following dockers of Liverpool sacked in a labour dispute and their supporters’ group, Women of the Waterfront, as they receive support from around the world and seek solidarity at the TUC conference.