WHY THE LABOR FILM FESTIVAL?

Human history has come to this day by producing class, sexual and ethnic contradictions within its own structure since the moment it came into settled life. In certain periods of history, these problems have been tried to be solved through wars shaped by ethnic, religious and national conflicts, while some historical actors have proposed and fought for egalitarian and libertarian solutions by going beyond ethnic, religious and cultural conflicts. While these efforts have sometimes been limited to intellectual or moral utopias, at other times, they have found expression in spontaneous uprisings (rebellions, revolts).

For the first time in history, the working class struggle and socialism, which matured intellectually in this struggle, put the longing for a classless, exploitation-free, stateless life worldwide on “scientific” foundations and made it a realizable idea.

In the light of this idea, the experience of the Paris Commune and then the Bolshevik Russian Revolution (the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia), in which a social order in which class domination was ended for the first time in history, took place and showed the world that this was possible.

In the reality of the 21st century, a period in which all social relations and contradictions are being redefined, we embrace the aspiration for a classless, exploitation-free, egalitarian, and just world as part of the working-class struggle. Regardless of the successes and failures of the 150-year history of this struggle, we acknowledge our mission to uphold this legacy and pass it on to new generations in a century where capitalism and imperialism not only exploit the wealth of workers and impoverished peoples but also commodify nature itself, eroding all social and human values.