Bermuda Royal Gazette
Doc maker hopes consumers will put pressure on denim brands
By Jessie Moniz
People deserve to know the truth about where their clothes come from, said the producer of a independent film to be shown at the Bermuda International Film Festival (BIFF).
Micha X. Peled of Teddybear Films, is the Israeli producer and director of China Blue which will be shown at BIFF. China Blue follows a group of teenage girls as they leave their rural homes for work at a jeans factory in the big city.
Although people in factories in China probably earn more than people in the country, life for the girls is not easy. For example, one threadcutter, Little Jasmine, does not get paid for at least four months. Often the girls, many of them under the age of 15, work through the day and the night with no overtime pay.
They live crowded together in cement dormitories where water has to be carried upstairs in buckets. Their meals and rent are deducted from their wages.
Most of their jeans are purchased by retailers in the United States. On the shelf the jeans they make may cost upwards of $60, but workers in the factory only get a small fraction of that.
“When people see my film, they are surprised by the economics of it,” Mr. Peled said in a telephone interview with The Royal Gazette. “It only costs four dollars to make a pair of jeans. Out of that, the workers get paid $1. When you buy an item of clothes, probably one percent is the salary of the worker. It could be doubled and would only cost you another dollar.”
“The film is not claiming that jeans are bad, or even that China products are worse off than anywhere else,” said Mr. Peled. “The consumer is not going to take care of the problem by carefully looking at the labels in the United States and choosing garments not made in China.”
In fact, Mr. Peled said there are very few denim brands that the consumer can buy in the United States that were actually made there, and the ones that are made in the United States tend to be very expensive. Also, factory conditions like this aren’t exclusive to China.
“All over the third world the conditions are similar,” said Mr. Peled.
He hoped that China Blue would create better educated consumers who would then pressure their favourite brands to improve conditions for their workers.
“Most people don’t want to have to feel guilty every time they buy an item of clothes,” said Mr. Peled. “Why should my clothes come at the expense of some poor teenager not getting to sleep, and having to work all night long? I envision that a lot of consumers will send a strong message through their brand.”
He said the business world has a lot of power to stop information from getting to the consumer.
“We should do anything we can do to get the information out,” he said. “Otherwise, there is no transparency in our lives. We should be able to look into a restaurant kitchen to see how they are preparing our meal. We are entitled to know how the clothes we wear are made.”
Mr. Peled said consumer pressure has worked in the past to create things like dolphin-safe tuna, or free-trade coffee, even though it means the purchaser have to pay a little bit more for the product.
“The issue is not only the workers’ pay,” said Mr. Peled. “There is also the issue of making them work all night long and housing them in substandard arrangements.”
There are factory inspections, but the workers are coached by their bosses on what to say to the inspectors. Mr. Peled felt there needs to be an independent third party inspection of the factory.
“Every brand does their own inspecting of the factories,” he said. “If you go to the website of certain well-known denim brands, they will tell you they have a strict code of conduct. We expose in the film this sham inspection. The whole thing is just a public relations shell game. “They always notify the factories in advance and the inspectors are paid by the retailer. The solution I envision is an independent inspection organisation that we can rely on. They will put their stamp of approval just like we have for organic food. It may cost a dollar or two extra, but there are plenty of people willing to pay that. If only ten percent of consumers want this, that is still a fair number of people.”
The Chinese defend their factory conditions by saying they are economically behind the west, so their standards are also behind.
Mr. Peled said: “They say ‘we are now on the level that the west was on in the 19th century. You have to give us time to get to the level of the 21st century’. We don’t have to accept that.
“We live in a different world today where we have a lot more information. Once we know, we are implicated. We no longer have the defence of ignorance.”
Mr. Peled followed the girls in the film around for over three years, sometimes going right into their dormitories at 3 a.m. or later.
Although some of the opening shots are “re-enacted” Mr. Peled did indeed meet the girls in the movie on their first day of work.
“Getting access to the factory was the key to making the film,” he said.
“I would say that in my films often that is the key. I get access to places where it is against the interests of the people there to allow me to film. In this case, we talked to many factory owners and were turned down. This factory owner in China Blue was very proud of his factory because it was new.
“The conditions there were better than average. He felt he had nothing to hide. In China this is the norm. It is not like I was filming in a sweat shop in San Francisco.”
The factory gave permission for Mr. Peled to follow around the girls, and after a couple of months of footage, forgot he was even there.
“I was able to show the public things they don’t normally get to see,” he said. “I do what I normally have to do to get the footage out.”* China Blue will be shown on March 22 at 9 p.m. at the Little Theatre, and on March 24 at 6.30 p.m. in Tradewinds Auditorium.
Amazing footage of factory life in China
China Blue will be shown on March 22 at 9 p.m. at the Little Theatre, and on March 24 at 6.30 p.m. in the BUEITradewinds Auditorium. For more information go to http://www.bermudafilmfest.com.@EDITRULE:If you were ever remotely curious about the people who made your blue jeans, China Blue is the film for you.China Blue, directed and produced by Israeli filmmaker Micha X. Peled of Teddy Bear Films, follows a group of Chinese teenagers as they leave the family farm in China for big city life in the Sichuan Province.
This documentary film focuses on 16-year-old Little Jasmine. Life in a denim factory as a thread cutter turns out to be quite grim. When Little Jasmine signs up at the factory, the manager tells her, “Work begins at 8 a.m. and overtime begins at 7 p.m.” In fact, Little Jasmine and her friends, many of them under the age of 15, frequently work until 3 a.m. without any overtime pay.
The jeans Jasmine works on are headed for the United States where they will be sold in stores like Wal-Mart. For a $60 pair of jeans, the factory receives a dollar, and Little Jasmine gets a fraction of that. Her salary averages between $30 and $60 a month. China Blue is a shocking film, partly because it was actually filmed in one of China’s better factories. China Blue is a film of contrasts, farm to city, and the life of a labourer compared to that of an owner. The glitzy life of the factory owner – a former police chief – makes a sharp contrast to that of the girls, who live in grim concrete dorms where the cost of their daily meals are taken out of their pay. The factory owner agreed to the making of the film, but it is doubtful he ever realised just how the west would perceive his operation. “The slanted US media portrays China as frightening and totalitarian,” the factory owner tells the camera. “We are a democratic society.”
China Blue shows anything but a democratic society. Totalitarian is exactly how they come across.
The opening scenes of the documentary were re-enacted, which was slightly disappointing, but in the rest of the film, Mr. Peled has achieved some amazing footage of life in the factory. He talks to factory inspectors, managers, and the girls who check the garments over for stray threads.
This is Mr. Peled’s fifth documentary. China Blue seems a natural follow-up to a previous film, ‘Store Wars’ about the controversy in a small town when a plan is launched to built a Wal-mart.
Festival to feature eight documentaries
by HEATHER WOOD
Also in the line-up is China Blue, by director Micha Peled.
As described by a Festival spokesperson, the documentary "takes film-goers inside a blue jeans factory, where Jasmine and her friends, Orchid and Li Ping, are trying to survive the harsh work environment. Shot clandestinely, the film has won numerous festival awards, including the Amnesty International Human Rights Award at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, widely considered the world's best documentary film festival."