Joe Hill

6/8/2025

Landing at Ellis Island from Europe at the start of the 20th century, the Hågglund brothers anticipate opportunities galore in this new land after years of poverty and illness at home in Sweden. Unable to speak the language, they can only find manual labour work and it is this dead-end existence that spurs Joe (Thommy Berggren) to challenge his ideals of just what life in the USA was going to mean! Separated from his brother he is soon travelling the land as a drifter, travelling illicitly on the railways and that’s when he encounters the enthusiastically burgeoning IWW. At first, they look like red-scarved Boy Scouts, but put them on an old soap box and soon they are bemoaning the lives of the workers to the chagrin of the bosses but offering hope of change and protest to the put-upon lab