In America, class consciousness can often be tough to find. Throughout most of my high school and college life — the late Bush years and early Obama years — labor and class were not things I ever really thought about. It wasn’t until my college had a workers’ films series, where I watched Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler in my junior year, did I start to even consider what a worker was or who was working class. The film’s depiction of an aging wrestler and stripper was soul-crushing, telling a bleak story of how labor harms the body over time and the ways industry and capital casually spit people out after using up their physical abilities. In a nation said to be made up of people who consider themselves “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” instead of workers or laborers, visual media is a uniquely powerful medium to expose viewers to ideas about labor.

The DC Labor Film Festival, a festival dedicated to showcasing movies about work, workers, and workers’ issues, started in 2000, organized by the Metropolitan Washington Council and the AFL-CIO. Chris Garlock, the festival director and a member of the Metro Council, told me that the major goals of the festival are to get cinemagoers to think about “work and workers in a context they’re not really conditioned to think about them.” Garlock maintains that films like Mike Judge’s Office Space and Nick Park and Peter Lord’s Chicken Run have just as much a place in the circle of workers’ cinema as do John Sayles’s Matawan or Ken Loach’s Kes.

The festival’s twentieth edition, playing now online at the AFI Silver Theatre virtual cinema through Sunday, June 6, includes recent festival hits like Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Miss Marx, Lila Avilés’s The Chambermaid, and Ezequiel Radusky’s The Lunchroom, acclaimed documentaries like William Greaves’s Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice, and some classic Hollywood cinema like Robert Siodmak’s The Whistle at Eaton Falls.