Al Jazeera America will produce a six-part documentary series in collaboration with Kartemquin Films. Production has already begun on Hard Earned, which will explore the lives of five American families struggling to keep food on the table and their dignity intact despite the reality of high living expenses and low wages. Were pleased to bring this important […]
Al Jazeera America will produce a six-part documentary series in collaboration with Kartemquin Films. Production has already begun on Hard Earned, which will explore the lives of five American families struggling to keep food on the table and their dignity intact despite the reality of high living expenses and low wages.
Were pleased to bring this important documentary series to Al Jazeera America, which explores the economic realities that many Americans face. This series goes beyond the politics and policy discussions and immerses the viewer in the true day-to-day struggles individuals and families face, getting by in todays economy, said Shannon High-Bassalik, Senior Vice-President, Documentaries and Programmes.
In the last year, weve seen low-wage work move to the forefront of the national conversation, says series executive producer and Kartemquin co-founder Gordon Quinn.
This shift gives us an opportunity to take the conversation a step further and look at the consequences of low-wage work on employees, their families, and their communities, he added.
Hard Earned is being executive produced by Kartemquins Steve James, Gordon Quinn, and Justine Nagan, who were responsible for Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters, The Trials of Muhammad Ali and recent Sundance hit Life Itself, among many other acclaimed documentaries.
Five stories, located in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, and two in the Chicago area, will be intertwined into six one-hour episodes. The series will shed more light on an ever-growing sector of the American workforce.
Low-wage jobs are the fastest growing sector of employment in the American economy, says executive producer Steve James. Yet the challenges of living on eight, ten or even 15 dollars an hour are still invisible to many Americans.
With an award-winning collaborative ensemble of producers and directors, Kartemquin will imbue the series with its signature style of emotionally intimate stories of people’s lives that bring social issues into sharp relief. Kartemquins previous multi-part series, The New Americans, a seven-hour series on immigration produced for PBS in 2004, was an International Documentary Association award-winner for Best Limited Series.
