7:15 pm | FREE ADMISSION | documentary film | 1 hour + Q&A – Be our test audience! Fill out a survey, participate in the Q&A, assist the artist in work-shopping and improving their piece.
In Gone Postal: The Documentary, employees speak out against injustice on the job. The film weaves director Jay Galione’s own father’s story, a career postal clerk and union shop steward who faced retaliation throughout his career, with stories of postal workers nationwide who are harassed, threatened, and fired for standing up for themselves and their fellow employees.
As Galione traveled the country, gathering these stories with fellow filmmaker, Sheila Dvorak, the very existence of the Post Office became threatened and a fight to Save the Post Office emerged. Through destructive acts of Congress, the government stole billions from the USPS, forcing a crisis. Now postal managers are cutting services, privatizing, downsizing, and eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs. The film upends the conventional story that the Internet is killing the Post Office.
Gone Postal is more than a documentary film about what’s happening inside the Postal Service, it’s a critical part of the movement to Save The People’s Post Office. Up against the trillion-dollar mail industry and its politicians who are privatizing the Postal Service in order to raise prices and lower wages, postal workers and activists are fighting back.
Galione and Dvorak believe the only way to reclaim our historic, public communication service is to educate, motivate, and inspire the American people. We must defend what’s ours before it’s gone:
-To STOP the shift from Living Wage to Low Wage jobs.
-To STOP the Sale of Properties We The People own.
-To PROTECT our Universal, Affordable access to Communicate from Every Corner of the Country.
Jay Galione is a filmmaker and musician living in Rosendale, NY. He graduated NYU with a degree in Film and TV; then moved to Los Angeles, honing his storytelling skills on movie trailers, shorts, feature films, and television. Credits include documentaries Lil’ Poison (2010) and Playground: The Child Sex Trade in America (Official Tribeca Selection – 2010). In 2014 Jay edited Mi America, a feature crime drama filmed in Newburgh, NY, slated for an HBO release in early 2017. Gone Postal is his feature directorial debut.
Sheila Dvorak is a filmmaker and activist whose narrative and documentary films have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and screened in theatres nationwide. She is currently the Development Associate at SUNY Ulster where she is involved with the scholarship program, social media strategy and video creation.
Artist’s New Work Forum is a new program at the Rosendale Theatre which provides an opportunity for artists, who may not have other opportunities or access to audiences, to present and workshop new work or works-in-progress to the public free of charge in the Rosendale Theatre.
This project is made possible with funds from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.
