Leather Soul: Working For a Life In a Factory Town

Noted author Studs Terkel narrates this beautifully filmed look at the rise and fall of the leather industry in Peabody, MA. Once the site of over 100 leather factories (providing some 21,000 jobs), tannery workers are a decided minority in Peabody today, numbering less than 400. Director Joe Cultrera presents a sumptuously visual and darn near tactile portrait of the leather-making process, interviewing men and women who all have an opinion why the leather industry failed (import taxes, pollution, union problems, plastics, and more). Although the camera lovingly lingers over tools and equipment that may soon only be found in museums, Leather Soul is not your basic milk run down the backroads of nostalgia. It's a film about people that underwent deep change. The men and women in Peabody remember a time when work, family, and community represented a kind of secular trinity that seemed to always bend, but not to break. Today, high tech industry fuels the economic engine in Peabody, but as one man notes: "everything can't be high tech...everybody can't go to college." It's the complaint, we sense, of many others of his generation, a casualty at the tailing end of the industrial age. Leather Soul consistently makes us think about the world outside of Peabody, MA, because the filmmakers have created not only a riveting portrait of a particular place, but a film which also seems to capture the temper of our times. Winner of a Bronze Apple award at the National Educational Film & Video Festival. Highly recommended for larger collections. (R. Pitman)