Into the Heart of Resistance

The Take | Andres D’Elia
The Take | Andres D’Elia
The Take | Andres D’Elia
Noelle Elia is a street-wise
synthesist and purveyor of the
positive. Au courant: doc on a
Toronto 'human landmark' and
personal hero named Franco.
following rumours of an emerging worker co-op
movement. This was not armchair activism—they
moved down there for 8 months and immersed
themselves in the upheaval.
“This is Argentina, but it could be anywhere. A
rich country made poor. Welcome to the globalized
ghost town.” So begins The Take. In the early 90s,
Argentina appeared to be a poster child of progress
and economic growth, but festering beneath all that
shiny foreign investment was a crumbling system fed
on corruption and greed. By 1999, it had all collapsed,
throwing the county into anarchy and despair.
In The Take, we meet people from three
factories who have risen up, taking power into
their own hands. They represent different facets of
the country’s struggle for renewal. Brukman’s suit
factory was the first operation to be occupied,
taken over by its seamstresses; it has since become
the “beloved symbol of Argentina’s new politics.”
Brukman’s is an “activist mecca” where meetings
take place during the day around sewing machines,
and at night, there are concerts outside the
factory’s gates. One woman sums it up with
troubling irony: “For us as workers, accounting is
easy. I don’t know why it’s so hard for the bosses to
pay salaries, buy materials and pay the bills—you
add and subtract.”
We meet Maty, a new co-op member at the
Zanon ceramic tile factory, which has been under
worker control for the past few years. She is young,
in her 20s, and represents the movement’s next
generation. Zanon is rooted in the community on
many levels: donating tiles to neighbouring
hospitals and schools. Popular rock bands have
written songs in support of Zanon.
If there's a protagonist in the film, an
unsuspecting hero, it would have to be Freddy, a
factory worker and family man. When his Forja
auto-parts plant shuts down, he and his co-workers
band together, and decide to organize. Forja is the
new kid on the block—Brukman and Zanon have
turned before—and it is through Freddy that we
have the opportunity to witness the step-by-step
process by which a movement is born. We see
council meetings and community networking
sessions, demonstrations in the streets, and
intimate family gatherings where financial
concerns are part of the daily conversation. These
sequences are eerily juxtaposed with the upcoming
presidential election and short-lived resurrection of
Carlos Menem, the former President of Argentina,
who brought the country into prosperity and then
poverty in the 90s.
While in Buenos Aires, Naomi Klein and Avi
Lewis lived collectively in a group of nine. She
explains that, “it was an adventure we were all
on together. An experiment and a moment of
people living in Argentina because we believed in
what people were trying to do there, and we
wanted to be a part of it and we wanted to learn
from it.” As a group, Lewis and Klein and the
others would brainstorm about how to illustrate
ideas in the film: for instance, a whole day was
spent on critiquing the IMF (International
Monetary Fund). They also watched political
documentaries together, like Life and Debt and
The Revolution Will Not be Televised, and
discussed what worked and what didn’t. “Not
everybody brought the same politics to the
project,” says Lewis. “Some of the people had
really strong feelings about consensual decisionmaking
and horizontal organizing. Of course
these are themes in the film, but it (the directing
process) was not a democracy. Ideologically they
had a really good point, but practically, (I was
the) director.” As first-time filmmakers, Lewis and
Klein were learning on the job, just like Freddy
and the boys at the Forja.
6POINT OF VIEW 55 | 2004