Berwick Street Collective, Nightcleaners

LUX Scotland presents Nightcleaners (1975), a documentary made by members of the Berwick Street Collective. The film follows the campaign to unionise women who cleaned office blocks at night, who were victimised and underpaid. Intending at the outset to make a ​‘campaign film’, the Collective was forced to turn to more avant-garde forms in order to represent the forces at work between the cleaners, the Cleaner’s Action Group and the unions, as well as the complex nature of the campaign itself. An intensely self-reflexive film that implicates both filmmakers and audiences in the process of precarious and invisible labour, it has become recognised as a key work of the 1970s and an important precursor to current political art practice.

This screening is part of GFT’s Crossing the Line strand.