“The Good, Bad and Ugly of Organizing Against Amazon’”: Stephen Maing and Brett Story on their Sundance-debuting Union

Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s unsurprisingly riveting Union is the one Sundance selection most assuredly not coming to Prime Video anytime soon — or ever. (Nor I’m guessing will the doc’s producers Samantha Curley and Mars Verrone be receiving any Amazon Studios Producers Awards from the Sundance Institute. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bezos behemoth did try to bid for Union to then bury it.) As its title succinctly implies, the film follows a group of very brave, and admirably unrelenting, activist-workers in their fight to unionize a Staten Island warehouse known as JFK8 back in 2021. Calling themselves the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), and led by the media-savvy Chris Smalls, it’s the classic David vs. Goliath setup. Only with Maing (whose Crime + Punishment followed the NYPD 12 whistleblowing cops) and Story (whose The Hottest August deeply embedded the Canadian director in NYC) jointly behind the lens — and on the frontlines — there’s enough street cred between the two to inspire the unwavering trust of their rightfully vigilant characters. Which, in turn, gives the critically acclaimed duo access to a tight-knit world the Blue Origin founder might try to infiltrate but could never imagine. Just prior to the film’s January 21st (US Documentary Competition) premiere Filmmaker reached out to the intrepid co-directors to learn all about their teaming up to tackle this anthropological project and take on The Man.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.