China Blue: The Production
China Blue Home Production Stills Reviews Awards Crew
China maintains a tight control over all foreign media. Filmmakers from abroad are required to obtain permits to film. If permission is granted, officials from the Propaganda Department accompany the production unit from the moment they arrive and are present throughout the filming. For obvious reasons, we chose not to apply for such a restrictive permit. Instead, we smuggled our DV camera into China by disassembling it and stashing the various parts into separate shopping bags… read more
Independent organizing of workers, by workers, is illegal in China, in violation of international treaties and covenants that China has signed. To find out what is going on for China’s workers beyond the gates of the factory where we filmed, we got in touch with labor organizers. The people we contacted must keep their activities completely underground, through a loose and clandestine network around the country. If caught, they face either a prison term or a labor re-education camp, where the authorities send people without trial or any due process of law… read more
Getting Inside
“Like some of Micha X. Peled’s previous films (Store Wars, Inside God’s Bunker), China Blue is primarily a deep-access film” (The Vancouver Sun). It is the first documentary to penetrate so completely the inside workings of a sweatshop factory, capturing scenes not only on the factory floor and in worker dorms, but also at management meetings and during tense negotiations with Western buyers. The main challenge for us was to get a Chinese factory owner to allow us to film. Naturally, most factories declined… read more
