Joe Hill

Joel Hägglund emigrates from Sweden to the United States with his brother in 1902 and loses track of him soon after, then drifts around the country looking for work. In the new country he becomes Joseph Hillström and then, under the name everyone knows, Joe Hill. What he sees of injustice pushes him towards the IWW, the union organising workers with no trade. Since gathering and speaking in public are forbidden, he turns his arguments into songs, joining a Salvation Army band on the street and singing his own words over it. Bo Widerberg shot the film in New York and in the American west, and it won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1971 as a Swedish director's account of American labour history. The film is not a hero's epic; instead of turning the man into a legend, Widerberg keeps him ordinary. It closes on a murder trial, and whether Hill was guilty is still argued about today.