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The Metal Foundry (1984)

★ — The Metal Foundry (1984)

Shot in Lae, Papua New Guinea's second-largest city, this 18-minute French co-production documents a real-world experiment in worker-managed industry at a moment when cooperative economics were a live political conversation across the developing world. The early 1980s saw a number of documentary makers drawn to post-colonial Pacific nations grappling with questions of economic self-determination, and Papua New Guinea, independent only since 1975, was a particularly charged setting for that kind of story. Director Bike Johnstone is largely absent from the wider documentary record, making this a curiosity even by the standards of short-form industrial documentary. The subject, a small metal foundry whose Australian owner had departed and whose workforce continued operations with provincial government support, was a modest but pointed case study in cooperative management.

A-Z World Movie Tour. Papua New Guinea What an annoying short film. It's 18 minutes long and the version I found was the only one and it was English overturned which was incredibly difficult to hear. The picture quality of woeful and the overdub didn't help. It's a story about a metal factory that the owner abandoned that the Papau New Guineans took over and continue to service orders and handle the day to day. Can't really recommend it to be honest

Rating: ★ | Year: 1984 | Watched: 2025-08-12

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