The Working Class Goes to Heaven

The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La classe operaia va in paradiso, 1971) is an Italian political drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Elio Petri. At Cannes 1972 it claimed the Palme d'Or — a pointed choice for a film that spends two hours grinding its audience through the same factory floor noise its characters can't escape. Gian Maria Volonté plays Lulù Massa, a machinist whose identity is built entirely on hitting his quota.

When an accident costs Lulù a finger, the rhythm breaks. Suddenly he has student activists on one side pushing him toward class consciousness, union bureaucrats on the other offering something that sounds like solidarity but mostly looks like politics, and management above them all keeping count. Mariangela Melato plays Lidia, a co-worker whose relationship with Lulù captures the film's argument better than any speech: exhaustion is not a personal failing, it is a design feature.

Petri and Volonté had already made The Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion together — here they push further into unease, shooting the factory with the relentlessness of a document rather than a drama. It's a loud, physical film that does not flatter its audience or its subjects. Stream The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971) online on iFILM.