AMERICAN DREAM

Thirteen years after her Academy Award winning HARLAN COUNTY, USA, Barbara Kopple has produced a second film masterpiece. In Austin, Minnesota in 1984, the Hormel Company substantially reduced the wages of 1500 meat?packers. These middle class union wage earners had come to expect an ever improving standard of living, and were provoked into a strike. Much more than a story about management oppressors and the union oppressed, however, Kopple discovered fierce dissension within the union itself. Five years were spent collecting footage of the small town being tragically torn apart. The result is an Academy Award winning documentary of unsurpassed drama and complexity, that raises the inescapable question: Can the American labor movement survive in the 1990s, and if so, at what cost?