FILMs & CLIPS

International clothing companies looked the other way as conditions in the garment factories deteriorated. Candid accounts from workers illustrate a disturbing lack of interest in the subhuman conditions. The corporate retailers refuse to comment, or deny outright the evidence presented in this powerful investigation.

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Tamil Nadu, Southern India. Millions of adolescents and young women work in the textile industry, from the cotton weaving to the production of ready-to-wear garments, for both local and the international market.

They often come from poor and rural areas, where there are no income alternatives neither for them nor for their families, especially given the constant and persistent decline of agriculture. It is in these villages that the "brokers", acting as intermediaries between the companies in need of a sizable and docile workforce, and local population ever more desperate, every year recruit hundreds of thousands of girls.

The girls are taken to the companies, where, beside working, they will also be living in factory hostels, although often they - nor their families and even some brokers - are not aware of this. They are enrolled through so called recruitment and exploitation schemes; one of the most know is the 'Sumangali scheme'.

Under the scheme, the girls must work between three and five years: exhausting shifts, up to twenty hours a day, in dangerous conditions, they are deprived of the freedom of movement and to communicate with the outside world, and they do not receive a monthly salary, but only a very small amount of money for their daily needs. At the end of the stated period of work, they should receive the cumulative payment of what they have earned over the years - between five hundred and eight hundred euro. They dream of being able to use that money as a dowry for their wedding.

Instead, what often happens are work accidents, missed payments, escapes, suicides, sexual violence, and even murders.

The girls themselves, by narrating their past and their future, draw a picture of the daily cruelty of a production system in which the first fashion victims are themselves, violated in the body and in their dreams, to produce what we wear everyday.

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Marrying stunning visuals with social advocacy, Rahul Jain’s debut documentary — winner of the Special Jury Award for Cinematography at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival — takes audiences into the labyrinthine passages of an enormous textile factory in Gujarat, India. Jain’s camera wanders freely between pulsating machines and bubbling vats of dye to create a moving portrait of the human laborers who toil away there for 12 hours a day to eke out a meager living for their families back home. Interviews with these workers and the factory owners who employ them reveal the stark inequality and dangerous working conditions brought about by unregulated industrialization in the region. This political message is delivered amidst the unsettling beauty of the factory’s mechanical underworld and the colorful, billowing fabrics it produces.

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The True Cost is a groundbreaking documentary film that pulls back the curtain on the untold story and asks us to consider, who really pays the price for our clothing?

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