In the national-communist imagination, workers and documentary filmmakers walked side by side. They shared an onerous position assigned to them as part of the official discourse of the one-party state: the workers were a crucial component of the social and political mechanism, since they were allegedly the class, fully aware of its historical role, on behalf of which the Party ruled; the documentary filmmakers also enjoyed the official limelight, being that privileged category of cinema workers tasked with depicting the country’s revolutionary present and, not least, the workers themselves. The films included here have in common an emphasis on the semantic family of ‘work’: work construed as alienating or liberating, work as a process, the refusal to work, the cult of work, efficient vs. inefficient work, work and time, work and female emancipation, gendered work, the poetry of work, etc.