working-class realism

Films grounded in the material conditions of working-class life — labor, wages, economic precarity, the daily negotiations of poverty and dignity — where the social texture of class is not backdrop but the primary subject, rendered with documentary-adjacent fidelity to the specific weight of work, debt, and survival: the factory floor, the benefit office, the secondhand market, the job that disappears. Distinct from urban-alienation (which centers the city as an anonymizing psychological force, not the economic structures that determine who can survive in it) by requiring class condition and labor as the organizing subject rather than metropolitan loneliness; distinct from naturalistic-performance (a formal register about acting style) by being a social-subject category — a working-class-realism film may use non-professional performers but is defined by what it is about, not how it is performed.