LONG HAULERS: Invisible Labor in Motion
by Zhena Faith Omojola
This spring, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) hosted its annual Documentary Voices series, a program dedicated to showcasing contemporary documentary films and fostering critical conversations around nonfiction storytelling. The series is presented in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Film 125: Documentary Forms course, taught by Professor Deniz Göktürk, creating a space where academic study and public film culture intersect. Starting with the Lumière Brothers’ early short Workers Leaving the Factory and Harun Farocki’s online archive of work scenes Labor in a Single Shot, the course focuses on intersections between labor and cinema. The opening film of this year’s Documentary Voices series was Long Haulers (2020), directed by Amy Reid, a Ph.D. candidate in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. At the end of the semester, Reid returned for a class visit to speak about her practice dissertation on Feminist Relationality in the Americas: Women’s Practices in Filmmaking & Quilting, which included her forthcoming film project Grandmother’s Garden. She also helped evaluate single shots of labor made by students. Reid’s debut feature documentary follows the lives of three female truck drivers, offering an intimate look at labor, mobility, and gender within a profession often dominated by men. Through personal storytelling and observational filmmaking, Long Haulers set the tone for a series committed to amplifying diverse documentary voices and perspectives. This film, now streaming on Kanopy, challenges viewers to reconsider invisible labor and overlooked lives.
Listening on the Road
The documentary follows three truck drivers, Sandi, a 77 year old veteran of the road, Lori, a formerly incarcerated woman rebuilding her life, and Tracy, a devoted guinea pig enthusiast, as they share their experiences navigating both the profession and the personal realities that come with it. Through their stories, Long Haulers offers an intimate portrait of what it means to live and work within an industry often defined by isolation and endurance.
The film’s style is rooted in immersion, placing the audience directly inside the truck alongside these women. Reid further deepens this intimacy by designing the film’s diegetic sound herself, carefully shaping the auditory landscape of the road through the hum of engines, shifting gears, and stretches of silence that mirror the emotional and physical rhythms of long haul driving. Long stretches of observation allow viewers to experience the rhythms of the road, emphasizing stillness, distance, and routine rather than dramatic spectacle. Themes of labor, gender, isolation, and autonomy emerge naturally through conversation and daily practice, revealing how each woman defines independence on her own terms. Reid’s intimate filmmaking approach fosters a sense of trust, allowing the drivers to open their worlds to the camera and transforming their workspaces into deeply personal environments that blur the line between job and home.
Invisible Labor in Plain Sight
Before seeing this film, the only time I thought about truck driving was when I felt annoyed at being stuck behind or next to a semi-truck on long road trips. My reactions were either indifferent or mildly irritated by their presence. I never considered the lives of the people driving those trucks, let alone whether women were navigating this overwhelmingly male-dominated profession. Long Haulers forces viewers to confront that indifference, urging us to look closely at the lives of these women and the challenges they endure to support themselves and their families.
The film asks us to move beyond passive ignorance and recognize how labor quietly structures our everyday lives. What once blended into the background becomes visible: the persistence, resilience, and sacrifice required to keep essential systems running. These women not only face the physical exhaustion of driving for endless hours on the road, but also the deeply embedded misogyny that shapes their working conditions.
One particularly striking moment occurs when Tracy recounts a memory about how when she sat in the passenger seat of a semi-truck while the male driver continuously sexually harassed her, violently grabbing her thigh and threatening to throw her out into the snow along the roadside. The scene exposes how the challenges these women face extend far beyond physical labor. Their work is invisible, but so too are the fear of sexual harassment, trauma, and emotional burdens they carry. Their experiences often remain unseen and unacknowledged despite sustaining an industry on which so many depend.
Before Long Haulers was shown at the BAMPFA, a short film titled You Can’t Automate Me (2021) by Katarina Jazbec was screened. The film focuses on lashers in the Port of Rotterdam, workers responsible for securing shipping containers with heavy metal bars before cargo ships depart the shipyard. Although Jazbec’s film centers primarily on men performing this physically demanding labor, the parallels between the two films are striking. Both documentaries reveal how essential work, no matter how time-consuming, dangerous, or physically taxing, can remain largely invisible to the public. At the same time they foreground growing tension between human labor and technological advancement, as automation increasingly threatens to replace workers whose embodied knowledge and physical skill cannot easily be replicated by machines. Together, the films underscore a shared reality: global supply chains rely on forms of labor that are simultaneously indispensable and undervalued, even as technological progress attempts to render those very workers invisible.
Who Keeps the World Moving
A central focus of the documentary is the growing disconnection between consumers and the goods they purchase. Most of the clothing people buy is no longer produced in the United States, and even food labeled as domestic has traveled long distances and passed through countless stages before arriving at the supermarket. The film reveals how modern consumption obscures the labor and movement required to sustain everyday life.
As Sandi walks through a grocery store, she points out specific items she has personally transported, including pasta and brooms. What appears ordinary to the average shopper becomes newly visible through her perspective. Most people rarely consider the complex journey products take before reaching their plates or homes. The documentary emphasizes that even truck drivers themselves occupy only one link in a vast supply chain, often disconnected from both the origins and final destinations of what they carry.
Sandi recalls that when she was growing up, her family sourced their meat directly from their farm, with her father often butchering the beef himself and distributing it among neighbors. In contrast, today’s food system feels distant and anonymous; cattle now come from places unknown to both consumers and workers alike. As she transports meat across the country, she too experiences this separation, unsure of where it originated or where it will ultimately end up. The film thus highlights a paradox of modern labor: the very people who keep goods moving are themselves estranged from the processes they sustain.
What Long Haulers Leaves Behind
Ultimately, Long Haulers asks viewers to reconsider the unnoticed systems that sustain everyday life and the people who keep them in motion. By centering women whose labor often goes unseen, the film transforms what once appeared ordinary into something deeply human and politically significant. Paired with You Can’t Automate Me, the documentary reveals a shared tension within modern economies: essential workers remain both indispensable and invisible, even as technological progress and consumer distance threaten to erase recognition of their contributions. Documentary filmmaking, in this context, becomes an act making visible, restoring attention to lives and forms of labor that exist in plain sight yet rarely receive acknowledgment. In asking audiences to slow down and truly observe, Long Haulers ultimately challenges us not only to see these workers differently, but to reconsider our own relationship to labor, consumption, and the interconnected world that moves around us every day.