Nearly thirty years after his verite drama The Big Flame (1968), Ken Loach returns to the Liverpool docks depicted in that earlier work to document another labor conflict endured by the sons and brothers of the original strikers. As the title suggests, the power of the dock workers’ movement has faded considerably over the last three decades: while compatriot workers from across the world express solidarity with their British colleagues, the strike attracts hardly any interest in Great Britain. Loach’s long-term consideration of the labor issues involved exposes what he believes to be the continuing methods used by the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) to sell out successive generations of the union’s own rank and file.

Lynne Sachs’s Investigation of a Flame is an intimate and experimental documentary portrait of nine suburban protesters who walked into a Cantonsville, Maryland, draft board office on May 17, 1968, grabbed hundreds of selective service records, and burned them with homemade napalm. Over the last two years, Sachs tracked down six of the seven living members of the Cantonsville Nine (including Daniel and Philip Berrigan), now in their late sixties, and interviewed them about their politically and religiously motivated action. Sachs’s poetic essay about the resistance of citizens at the height of the Vietnam War explores not only their act of civil disobedience but the profoundly personal ways in which the revelations and disappointments of aging have contributed to their retrospective ambivalence about this experience.