Annotations for Speaker: Robin Yurovich

As Bread and Roses opens, its heroine, Maya Montenegro, played by Pilar Padilla, survives a dramatic border crossing.

Once in Los Angeles, she joins her sister, Rosa, played by Elpidia Carrillo, working as a janitor in a downtown high-rise. Soon, a union organizer comes calling.

Maya liked Sam, played by actor Adrien Brody and the idea of the union, but the more hardened and cynical Rosa is not so easily persuaded.

Nearly a decade after he came up with the idea for Bread and Roses, screenwriter Paul Laverty was back in Los Angeles for the film's opening party.

He'd just arrived from his state of Scotland in the early 90s when thousands of janitors, mostly from Mexico and Central America, were beginning to demand better pay and benefits.

Laverty convinced director Ken Loach there was a film in the story of the janitors and he began poking around the union where he ran into organizer Jono Shaffer.

Shaffer, who bears a resemblance to the film's organizer, says Laverty and Ken Loach took some artistic license, making the work of the organizer a little more reckless and spontaneous than it is in real life.

But he says they didn't exaggerate the difficulty of organizing a union in the United States.

Real life janitor Dolores Sanchez says she saw a lot of herself and her co-workers in Bread and Roses.

For the three and a half years it took to organize the union at her company, Sanchez says she went to work every night fighting her fears of a confrontation with the boss or of losing her job.

Now Sanchez says the sacrifices of those years are paying off. She couldn't have a much wanted third child until she got family health insurance. Now she's got it and her baby's due late this summer.

Bread and Roses mixes drama and fiction with reality.

Director Ken Loach required the actors to work a shift alongside real life janitors, some of whom also appear in the movie along with other L.A. activists.

In this scene at a union celebration, the music is provided by Los Jornaleros del Norte, five men who haven't quit their real life day jobs.

They're members of L.A.'s day laborers union and they play their topical songs at labor and immigrant rights events.

Bread and Roses has received mostly thumbs up from the critics, but as a business venture, it's a little risky, says its distributor Tom Ortenberg of Lionsgate Films.

The film was made independently, backed by a group of investors from Europe, but says Ortenberg he hopes it's successful enough at the box office to convince Hollywood to take on similar projects.

Bread and Roses debuts June 1st in 15 to 18 cities across the country with more to follow in the coming weeks.

For Latino USA, I'm Robin Yurovich in Los Angeles.