Fighting for Our Lives

  • Documentary
1/1/1975
59

Storyline

Fighting for Our Lives is a 1975 documentary film produced and directed by Glen Pearcy. The film documents the striking of California grape workers from Coachella to Fresno as they negotiate for a United Farm Workers (UFW) contract in 1973. The film also depicts their non-violent struggle against police brutality on the picket lines. It was nominated for the 1976 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

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      Reviews

      • Geronimo1967

        When the grape pickers of California reject the intervention of the Teamsters and overwhelmingly vote to remain in their own United Farmers Union, their subsequent strike action pits them not only against their employers but also against enforcers from the union they declined to join. With the courts weighing in with injunctions limiting their picketing opportunities and then the workers being intimidated and even brutalised, the struggle for their rights becomes a dangerous and violent one. The police appear, at the start anyway, to be trying to remain impartial but as this dispute protracts, even they begin to operate on the wrong side of increasingly frayed legal boundaries. Its hard to imagine fifty years later just how hard it was to p...

        January 10, 2026

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