IN CINEMA

TOKYO UBER BLUES 東京自転車節
Co-Presented with Kani Releasing
Friday, November 15th at 7PM
Tickets: $15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price 

Taku Aoyagi, 2021, 93 min.

Unemployed in the wake of the pandemic, 26 year-old filmmaker Taku Aoyagi decides to try his luck in Tokyo. Short on worldly possessions but a bike and a phone, he becomes an Uber Eats rider. Now, he can decide his own hours and is free to choose when to take orders! But pedaling through deserted streets delivering boba tea to cloistered condos, he starts to wonder... what was it that Ken Loach said about the Uberization of society?

Thrillingly shot from a first-person perspective on a mixture of smartphones and GoPros, first-time vlogger-turned-director Taku Aoyagi invites the audience to join him on his daily rides speeding through a deserted city. Talking to himself and his peers, he asks: for a young, unemployed person with $40,000 of student debt, does gig-work offer a model for the future?

Post-screening discussion with Erik Foreman, co-founder of The Drivers Cooperative!

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Erik Forman is co-founder of The Drivers Cooperative, the first driver-owned rideshare platform cooperative in the United States, as well as People’s Choice Communications, the world’s first worker-owned ISP, launched by striking cable technicians. Before turning toward cooperative development as a strategy for system change, Erik was active in the labor movement for over 15 years, leading groundbreaking unionization campaigns in the fast food industry and conducting organizing trainings and workshops across the world.

Erik is pursuing a PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He currently teaches at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies in New York City, and is a visiting fellow at the Mobility Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School.