Nightcleaners

A groundbreaking record of the early 1970s campaign to unionize the women who cleaned London's office blocks at night, exploited and invisible.

Made by the Berwick Street Collective between 1970 and 1975, Nightcleaners follows the struggle of night cleaners who were being victimized and underpaid, and the grassroots effort to organize them. Originally conceived as a straightforward campaign film, the Collective found themselves grappling with the complexities of the campaign, the tensions between the cleaners, the Cleaners' Action Group and the unions, and the result broke open into something far more radical. A deeply self-reflexive work, Nightcleaners implicates both its makers and its audience in the very processes of precarious, invisible labour it documents. Widely recognised as a landmark of British political and feminist cinema, its questions about representation, solidarity and the visibility of low-paid workers feel as pressing now as they did fifty years ago.