Barbara Kopple, the two-time Oscar-winning director behind *Harlan County, USA* and *American Dream*, returns to the subject of organised labour with *Union Town*, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The documentary examines the modern American gig economy through the struggles of UPS drivers, Amazon warehouse workers and app-based delivery couriers in New York City, arguing that the fragmented, isolated nature of gig work has made solidarity harder to build even as inequality deepens. Reviewers note the film covers similar ground to the 2024 documentary *Union*, but its shift from small-town settings to sprawling New York gives it a distinct, if less intimate, urgency.

Filmed from summer 2023 using Kopple's trademark observational style, the documentary follows around a dozen key figures rather than centring on a single strike, including UPS driver Shellyanne Ellison, Amazon organiser Ira Pollock at the Maspeth, Queens warehouse, app delivery drivers Alejandro Grajales and William Medina, and organiser Ligia Guallpa of the Workers Justice Project. Their stories touch on issues such as unsafe working conditions, precarious immigration status and the threat of a second Trump presidency, framing the film as a broader "state of the union" reflecting on unresolved economic hardship in America.