Directed and Edited by Nickos Ventouras
Original Score by Manos Ventouras
Associate Producer Menelaos Tzafalias
Louis Tikas song by Frank Manning (Best Folk Song, 2002).
website: http://www.palikari.org/
Summary
Palikari – Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre deals with labor relations in early 20th century America, as told through the story of Greek migrant and trade union activist Louis Tikas. 2014 marks the centenary of his brutal killing during what acclaimed historian Howard Zinn called the “culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history”. Director Nikos Ventouras and producer Lamprini Thoma chart the story of the great 1913-1914 coalminers’ strike and Louis Tikas’s murder, as it survives in oral and family traditions, as well as in official history. They interview historians and artists, some of them direct descendants of those striking miners. Labor movement emblem Mother Jones and industrialist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. also make cameo appearances in this palimpsest of memory, struggle and deliverance. Tikas’s story can but reverberate in our time, in view of what is happening with the rights of workers and immigrants around the world.
