Program 15: 'Taken for A Ride' and 'Land of Dreams' Immigrant Taxi Drivers

The Last Newspaperman examines the crisis of local journalism, its causes, and the proposals to fix it, through the personalized frame of one local newspaper reporter’s life and career. The short film introduces a veteran of local journalism, Joe Napsha, who has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for forty-five years as a general assignment reporter. The film follows Napsha at work to show viewers how local news is made and uses archival footage to reflect on the evolution of the form throughout his career, with equal focus on the past and the future.
Interwoven with Napsha’s story is the filmmaker’s own struggle with unemployment and the search for stability. As the job hunt takes its toll, the film confronts fundamental questions about the meaning of work, its impact on family, and what it takes to build a sustainable life. (2024, 17m, Director: Daniel Napsha)

Taken For A Ride: How San Francisco Backstabbed a Generation of Cab Drivers - San Francisco’s Taxi Medallion Sales Program promised cab drivers a path to financial stability, but instead, it became a financial trap. As City Hall embraced the rise of Uber and Lyft, taxi medallion owners - who had paid $250,000 for the right to operate - found themselves drowning in debt with no way out. Through the stories of three cab drivers, this documentary explores the human cost of a policy failure that left a once-prized permit worthless and an industry in crisis. (2025, 14m, Director: Peter Thomas Ruocco)
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Land Of Dreams - Filmed for nearly a decade, Land of Dreams is an intimate portrait of Virender Rana, a taxi driver from India, chasing his dream of telling his story in America. While he points the camera at his own life and films a Bollywood style movie, the film follows his journey of coming to America, finding joy as part of a larger Sikh community and that of taxi drivers and laying roots as an immigrant. As he joins the elite Uber Black fleet hoping for his dreams to come true, he faces challenges of being a brown immigrant on the streets of post-9/11 America. Land of Dreams is a letter of solidarity and hope to anyone who has searched for a home and a land for their dreams in a place where they were not born. (2025, 40m, U.S./India, Director: Ambarien Alqadar)
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Host or Publisher Workers Unite Film Festival, Inc.