The movie trailer for a wonderful documentary film about Men at Work: immigrants in New York, forever immortalized in the classic old photo of eleven ironworkers sitting on a beam high above the Manhattan skyline.
New York City, 1932. The country is in the throes of the Great
Depression, the previous decade's boom of Italian, Irish, and Jewish
immigrants has led to unprecedented urban expansion, and in the midst of
an unseasonably warm autumn, steelworkers risk life and limb building
skyscrapers high above the streets of Manhattan.
In MEN AT LUNCH,
director Seán Ó Cualáin tells the story of "Lunch atop a Skyscraper,"
the iconic photograph taken during the construction of Rockefeller
Center that depicts eleven workmen taking their lunch break while
casually perched along a steel girder -- boots dangling 850 feet above
the sidewalk, Central Park and the misty Manhattan skyline stretching
out behind them.
For 80 years, the identity of the eleven men --
and the photographer that Immortalized them -- remained a mystery: their
stories, lost in time, subsumed by the fame of the image itself. But
then, at the start of the 21st century, the photograph finally began to
give up some of its secrets. Part homage, part investigation, MEN AT
LUNCH is the sublime tale of an American icon, an unprecedented race to
the sky and the immigrant workers that built New York.
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