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MEN AT LUNCH (58' & 75')
GENRE: DOCUMENTARY
DIRECTED BY SEAN O CUALAIN
 
  
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Magazine MipTV '13 "Can't Miss" Picks!
"A textbook example of a
well-crafted feel-good doc... pic devotes even more time
to placing those laborers and the products of their
labor in a vividly evoked historical context."
-Variety
"Men At Lunch is a fascinating film... and Ó Cualáin?s
photographic detective work is both evocative and
eloquently effective."
-Screen
Daily
Lunch Atop a Skyscraper
-New
York Times Story
Men at Lunch is the untold story of New
York?s greatest legend and one of the most iconic images
of the 20th century - Lunch atop a Skyscraper - taken on
the 69th floor of the Rockefeller Building in the autumn
of 1932.
New York City, 1932. The world is in the throes of the
Great Depression, the previous decade's boom of Italian,
Irish, and Jewish immigrants has led to unprecedented
urban expansion, and in the midst of an unseasonably warm
autumn, steelworkers risk life and limb building
skyscrapers high above the streets of Manhattan.
In Men at Lunch, director Seán Ó Cualáin tells the story
of Lunch atop a Skyscraper, the iconic photograph taken
during the construction of the GE Building that depicts
eleven workmen taking their lunch break while casually
perched along a steel girder - boots dangling 850 feet
above the sidewalk of 41st Street ?Central Park and the
misty Manhattan skyline stretching out behind them. The
definitive counterpoint of epic and mundane ? a symbol of
the indomitable working man.
Part homage, part investigation, Men at Lunch is the
revealing tale of an American icon, an unprecedented race
to the sky and the immigrant workers that built New York
as we know it today.
For 80 years, the identity of the eleven men ? and the
photographer that immortalized them ? remained a mystery:
their stories, lost in time, subsumed by the fame of the
image itself.
But then, at the start of the 21st century, the photograph
finally began to give up some of its secrets.
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