Berwick Street Film Collective: Nightcleaners

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Photo courtesy of CCCB.

Nightcleaners documents the struggle to unionize a group of women who clean large office blocks at night, working under precarious conditions. Intended originally by the members of the British Berwick Street Film Collective (Marc Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan) as a campaign film, during the process it becomes an essayistic, self-reflexive film about the difficulty of representing these experiences and subjectivities: "what we did was we revealed the situation of the nightcleaners on the one hand and, on the other, the impossibility of capturing those lives" (Karlin).

Between 1970 and 1972, former cleaner May Hobbs, with the support of members from the women's movement, encouraged the women who cleaned London's office blocks to unionize and fight for better pay and working conditions. Berwick Street Film Collective's work focuses on the largely immigrant cleaners of the London Shell building, who had to alternate their repetitive work with domestic chores and caring for their families.

The film will be in English with Catalan subtitles.

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