SYNOPSIS

DIRTY DAYS IN FUN CITY is an all-archival footage film that tells the story of the 1968 sanitation worker strike in New York City, a nine-day stand-off between union leaders and city officials that resulted in a public health emergency and city-wide panic. The film illuminates the institutional barriers faced by this undervalued workforce, namely the effect of the Taylor Act (1967) that banned public employees from striking, stripping them of their most potent bargaining tool. The sanitation union president succumbed to jail time, but not to defeat, and the union secured pay increases and better pensions. Meanwhile, everyday New Yorkers confronted the importance of an invisibilized workforce as the city became buried in garbage–120,000 tons by the end of the strike. 

As the New York strike came to a close, a sanitation strike in Memphis sprang up. It became a mammoth two-month-long civil rights struggle. The predominantly Black workers were soon joined by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and on King’s third trip to Memphis, he was assassinated, making the Memphis strike a pivotal event in civil rights history. While the Memphis strike was ultimately of much vaster scale than New York’s, the New York sanitation workers “gave [Memphis workers] the courage to act,” according to civil rights leader Jesse Epps. The final act of the film draws this little-known connection between the two movements.

The film highlights the importance of organized labor to securing fair pay and safe workplaces, which remains relevant for workers in every industry today. While the story has universal merit, the film also calls attention to the unique struggles of sanitation workers, a stigmatized workforce made less visible to the public by design. In the 1930s, sanitation uniforms changed from white to forest green. While the white uniforms were intentionally conceived to signal to the public that sanitation workers were public health professionals, the change in color represented a shift in attitude. Making the workers less visible put them out of mind, effectively equating garbage collectors with refuse. As the union president, John DeLury, was known to say, “We may pick up garbage, but we are not garbage.”

The film also explores the environmental impact of waste. New York City alone produces approximately 35,000 tons of garbage per day. When food waste decomposes in landfills, it releases methane—a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. The film asks its audience to assess their own waste, and recognize the people responsible for managing it––the essential workers whose often unseen labor helps keep our cities running and clean.

ARTIST STATEMENT

As a team (2 Train Productions, LLC), we create archival documentaries that surface forgotten New York stories of fruitful political resistance. We have navigated the institutional barriers that keep footage buried in the archive and are passionate about unearthing materials to create engaging and artful historical narratives. 

To celebrate the archive, we embrace the texture and degradation within the found media and use long takes to allow footage to unfold in real time. This approach preserves the quality of the original footage while inviting the audience to sit with the characters and events. We also forgo using talking heads to fully transport the viewers to the 1960s, allowing the archive itself to carry the narrative weight.

We draw aesthetic inspiration from Wim Wenders’ ‘Wings of Desire,’ where angels wander unseen through a city, observing its beauty and its suffering. Since feeling unseen was part of why the sanitation men went on strike, we want to explore the idea of wandering through a city undetectable, similar to how the angels exist in Wings of Desire. To do so, we borrow techniques from the film, shots of busy streets from high up angles or aerial views that make viewers feel like an onlooker, apart from the movement of the city. We also use shots of the sky after montages to visually reinforce the theme of invisibility, mirroring the way both trash and the workers who collect it are overlooked, while giving viewers quieter beats to reflect on and digest the story.

BIO

ZAZIE RAY-TRAPIDO, Producer

Zazie Ray-Trapido is a filmmaker and producer based in Los Angeles. Her films expand on traditional formats of documentary and narrative, engaging with analog film techniques, archives, and performance. Her practice investigates relationships between memory, ideology, and the environment. Her work has been screened at festivals and venues worldwide, including the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Viennale, Curtas Vila do Conde, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Glasgow Short Film Festival, ICDOCS, Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, RIDM, and Kasseler Dokfest, among others. She holds a BFA from Bard College and an MFA in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts. As a producer, she focuses on creative forms of narrative and nonfiction projects exhibited at Tribeca and IFFR, supported by Ikusmira Berriak, Sundance Institute, Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual (ICA), Yale University, Berlinale Talents, IndieLisboa, Big Sky Pitch, and the Claims Conference.