Part homage, part investigation, Men at Lunch is the revealing tale of an American icon, the unprecedented race to the sky and the immigrant workers that built New York in the throes of the Great Depression. The film will open in New York on September 20 at the Quad Cinema.
In New York, 1932 the previous decade's boom of Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants led to unprecedented urban expansion, and workers risked life and limb building skyscrapers high above the streets of Manhattan. In Men at Lunch, director Seán Ó Cualáin tells the story of the iconic photo "Lunch atop a Skyscraper," that is a definitive counterpoint of epic and mundane - and become a symbol of the indomitable working man. Taken during the construction of the GE Building, the photo depicts eleven workmen taking their lunch break while casually perched along a steel girder - boots dangling 850 feet above the sidewalk of 41st Street - Central Park and the misty Manhattan skyline stretching out behind them. For 80 years, the identity of the eleven men - and the photographer that immortalized them - remained a mystery: their stories, lost in time, subsumed by the fame of the image itself. But then, at the start of the 21st century, the photograph finally began to give up some of its secrets.Videos