Film Forum

A visual paradox: intensely sensual images of colorful fabrics produced in a hellish Indian factory in which men and children work 12-hour days for a pittance, some barefoot, some in flip-flops. Rahul Jain captures working conditions that suggest the worst extremes of Dickensian London -- his camera unblinking at the torrential cascade of textiles that these clambering, shrieking machines produce, seemingly nonstop. When asked why he made the squalor so beautiful, the filmmaker replied: “so you cannot look away,” and indeed we cannot.

INDIA / GERMANY / FINLAND • 2016 • 72 MINS.  • IN ENGLISH AND HINDI WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES • KINO LORBER

Presented with generous support from the Richard Brick, Geri Ashur & Sara Bershtel Fund for Social Justice Documentaries.

Reviews

“First-timer Rahul Jain takes his cameras in a textile factory right outside of Calcutta and glides them through hallways, past weary workers and into the bowels of global capitalism in search of answers… A poetic, humanistic look at a sweatshop that leaves its didacticism at the front door.”
– David Fear, RollingStone.com

“An all-too-rare combination of artistic vision and social conscience. Eye-opening and austerely  uncompromising… showing controlled concentration and unfussy flair. Powerfully evokes the sights and sounds - and almost the smells - of a sprawling, stygian textiles plant. A quietly damning expose of dehumanization. A claustrophobic, haunting vision of the kind of grim workplace traditionally associated with the UK of the Victorian era. An overwhelming sensory immersion into a hidden, secretive environment… (of) vast, subterranean expanses.”
– Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter

“Bristling with angry human-rights subtext. Gliding, quietly mesmerising… The film opens as a hushed, graceful story of machinery in motion, gazing lingerly…to almost hypnotic effect… The camera, elegantly manned by rodrigo Trejo Villanueva… works as macro and micro levels, closing in  on a wealth of expressive and reactive human detail… (A) simultaneously beautiful and abjectly unhappy film.”
– Guy Lodge, Variey

“The nightmare quality of something from a Fritz Lang silent epic.”
– Allan Hunter, Screen Daily