Barbara Kopple’s Union Town, screened at the Venice Film Festival, tracks app-based delivery couriers in New York City as they confront dangerous street conditions and pursue union recognition. The film follows workers often described as “deliveristas” as they navigate the hazards of urban deliveries while attempting to build collective power against large corporate platforms.
A third instalment in what Kopple presents as a loose trilogy scrutinising US labour, Union Town ties the director’s latest concerns to earlier works. Kopple first made her name with 1976’s Harlan County, USA, about a coal miners’ strike, and continued the theme with 1990’s American Dream, which focused on a meatpacking plant dispute. Union Town updates that lineage to the era of app economies and shadow labour.
The documentary moves between charged picket lines and the more perilous reality of New York’s streets, portraying a workforce that many companies rely on but that remains precarious and often undocumented. Kopple frames these couriers’ efforts to organise as part of a broader struggle against corporate power, including unionising campaigns involving Amazon staff that have become a central battleground in contemporary labour politics.
Stylistically the film is direct and insistent, connecting present-day organising to older currents in American labour history. Kopple’s approach evokes earlier cultural and political touchstones — from populist protest traditions to New Deal-era reforms — while insisting on the immediacy of present risks and grievances. Union Town presents the couriers’ effort as both a specific campaign and a wider indictment of how modern economies depend on vulnerable, often invisible workers.
Whether viewed as a continuation of Kopple’s decades-long audit of workers’ rights or as a standalone portrait of app-based labour, Union Town foregrounds the human cost of delivery economies and the determination of workers seeking collective remedies. The film adds a contemporary, contested chapter to ongoing debates about gig work, immigration, and the future of organising in the United States.