The Farmington story wasn't made to live inside a YouTube page. It works when someone stops operations for ninety minutes, gathers a team in a room, and leads the conversation that comes after. This page exists to help you run that screening properly, in any company of any size, with no need for a production team or budget.
The screening takes between ninety minutes and two hours if you take the "after" part seriously. That's a sizeable chunk of any company's calendar, so it makes sense to reserve it for moments when the subject will actually be treated, and not to fill an empty slot just because there was time left between two training sessions. The five contexts below are the ones that work best.
Every company has at least one week a year set aside to talk about workplace safety on purpose, and the screening fits there without needing extra justification. It works especially well on opening day or on the day with the highest confirmed attendance, because the conversation that follows needs people who are alert and willing to engage.
Someone's first week inside a company is when that person learns which things are taken seriously and which are just bullet points on a slide. Screening the documentary during onboarding places safety on the same level as the talk about mission, values and benefits, and that is different from handing out a workplace-safety PDF for self-reading.
When directors and managers meet outside the office to plan the year or discuss culture, safety usually turns into a fifteen-minute topic squeezed between commercial strategy and financial targets. Replacing those fifteen minutes with the screening, even if it takes half an afternoon, is one of the few ways to make that leadership feel the real weight of what they decide when they approve or deny investment in safety.
April twenty-eighth is World Day for Safety and Health at Work, and that date exists precisely because of the story told in the documentary. Screening the film on that date closes the loop. There's no need for rhetorical hooks or introductory lectures, because all it takes is opening with where the date comes from and letting the film speak.
When a company goes through a real accident, or even a near-miss that shook the team, there is a short window when everyone is open to looking at safety differently. Screening the documentary at that moment, with care and time for the conversation afterwards, helps turn the scare into a structured decision instead of letting it become a forgotten memo.
A large share of the difference between a screening that moves the room and a screening that becomes background noise happens before the film even starts. The decisions below are the ones most often skipped and the ones that cost the most later.
The film runs about seventy-five minutes. The conversation afterwards needs at least forty-five minutes to make sense. Booking only the film's runtime and pushing the debate to "if there's time left" is the most common way to waste the session.
Sessions with up to fifteen people work as conversations where everyone speaks. Sessions with more than fifty work as events where some speak and most listen, and that also has value. What doesn't tend to work is the middle ground, because groups between twenty and forty often get stuck, with people who don't speak because they feel exposed and don't listen because they're distracted.
The documentary exists in three versions with original audio in Portuguese, and in subtitled versions in English and Spanish. Confirming which version to use before the day avoids the embarrassment of discovering on the screen that the subtitles are in the wrong language for half the room. In mixed teams, always prefer subtitles over improvised dubbing.
The person who leads doesn't need to be a safety expert or a film critic. They need to be someone who will dare to ask open questions and stay quiet waiting for an answer, instead of filling pauses with personal opinion. HR people with trained listening usually do this better than technical safety leadership, depending on the company's culture.
Before the session, in some kind of advance communication, it's worth saying that the documentary deals with a real industrial tragedy with seventy-eight deaths, without explicit scenes but with considerable emotional weight. That simple notice respects anyone who'd rather not attend for personal reasons, and prepares those who stay to receive the story with the attention it asks for.
The first rule is not to interrupt the documentary under any circumstance once it has started. Not to check the audio, not to ask if everyone is following, not to make a side comment that seemed funny in the moment. The film was built to be watched whole, without breaks, and any interruption breaks the narrative tension that makes the session work.
The second rule is to open up space for personal notes during the screening, even if no one ends up using them. Handing out blank sheets and pens before the film starts gives people a place to put their reactions as they appear, and creates material for the debate of the second half without depending on memory from half an hour earlier. Anyone who prefers just to watch doesn't take notes, and that's fine.
The third rule is to pay attention to emotional reactions without dramatizing them. The documentary touches people who have lost someone in workplace accidents, families of workers, and sometimes colleagues who lived through the near-miss of last week. Having someone from HR discreetly available, and knowing the shortest route to a glass of water or a quiet room, is different from turning the session into group therapy.
The most important part of the screening is the moment the film ends and someone has to start the conversation. Without that part, the documentary becomes just a well-made film session and the company goes back exactly where it was before the lights went down. The three questions below serve as a starting point, and they work best when asked in this exact order.
Start with the personal reaction before any technical analysis. Whoever answers first tends to set the tone of the conversation, so it's worth inviting by name one or two people you know will speak from something emotional, instead of letting those who default to protocol-talk go first. Reserve ten to fifteen minutes for this first round.
This is the bridge between Farmington in nineteen sixty-eight and the company's operations today. Ask this question without filling in your own example, because your example will close down answers in the direction you imagined instead of opening up to what the group actually perceives. Fifteen to twenty minutes.
This is the question that separates a screening that becomes meeting minutes from a screening that becomes a decision. Don't accept generic answers like "invest more in safety", and instead ask for a specific commitment with name, deadline and owner. Reserve the last fifteen to twenty minutes for this, and end the session with at least three commitments written on a flipchart or in the meeting chat, with the names of who took on each one.
The person who leads must resist the temptation to take notes on everything and send a formal report the next day. What works best is sending, within twenty-four hours, only the list of commitments made with the names, in a short email to everyone present, without analysis or thanks. That simple document is what creates public accountability for what was agreed, and it's the only thing that survives once the memory of the session cools off.
The full documentary is published on the official YouTube channel in three language versions, with audio in Portuguese and subtitles in English and Spanish, and access is free for any company that wants to run an internal screening at no cost and without needing a commercial license.
For projection in a room, the recommended path is to open the video in full screen directly in the browser connected to the projector, test audio and image before the group arrives, and disable OS notifications to avoid pop-ups during the session. There is no official download version, so the session always runs connected to the internet, which means the room's connection should be confirmed in advance.