'China Blue'

Documentary. Directed by Micha Peled. In Mandarin with subtitles. (Not rated. 87 minutes. At the Roxie)

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The most heartbreaking, moving film in theaters right now is not "Babel," "Letters From Iwo Jima" or "Little Children." It is "China Blue," a documentary about sweatshop workers at a denim factory.
The heart and soul of San Francisco filmmaker Micha Peled's follow-up to his "Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town" is 16-year-old Jasmine, a farmer's daughter who displays a talent for writing, faithfully keeping a diary and dreaming of being a martial arts princess. Instead, she works at the Lifeng factory in Shuxi, China, working 17-hour days and making 6 cents an hour. She is one of 130 million Chinese who have a factory job.

Peled's film is not a bleeding-heart tract on globalization and capitalism. It is a layered portrait of sweatshops because he has gotten amazing access to the Lifeng factory -- at the invitation of its proud owner, Lam, who is eager to show it off. Thus Peled gains full access to the factory, where we meet Jasmine, a thread-cutter; 19-year-old Orchid, a zipper installer; Liping, a seamstress who appears to be in her 20s, and 14-year-old Jade, who is Jasmine's best friend.

Also, incredibly, Peled sits in on management meetings, where Lam proudly exclaims, "We never miss a deadline, even if it means the workers stay all night," orders some workers fired and has to deal harshly with an employee uprising when he is late with their pay.

Lam, however, is not a wholly villainous figure. He is in a competitive business, and if he pays workers minimum wage and overtime, he will not survive. The real villains, Peled seems to show, are the international corporations which buy the jeans the factory produces. Peled sits in on two meetings, one with a French buyer and one with a British buyer, and the British buyer is a particularly hard negotiator. He insists on a certain price that is lower than the lowest price that Lam can offer, and Lam has no choice but to accept. The lower prices, of course, means the difference comes out of the workers' pay.

Ultimately though, it is the workers who settle in your heart. Jasmine, battling fatigue and sleeping about four hours a night on average, sneaks out with a friend at midnight to buy "energy medicine" to keep going through the night to keep up with a big order. Her absence is noticed, of course, so she is fined two days' pay.

This is an unforgettable film.

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G. Allen Johnson

Blue jeans blues: Filmmaker looks at the human cost of cheap clothes
Staff Report
Article Launched: 01/16/2007 09:32:42 AM PST

Micha X. Peled knows that if the world is connected by some common thread, that thread is being stitched by an underpaid worker in sweatshop a hemisphere away.
Peled, a San Francisco filmmaker who led the nuclear-freeze movement in Marin in the 1980s, will be in San Rafael and Larkspur this weekend screening his film, "China Blue," an intimate and eye-opening look into the personal lives of sweatshop workers.
The film is a unflinching indictment of globalization and the unfettered consumerism that fuels it. The cheap clothes we wear come at a high price, for real people.
"It's the international retailers who are driving this system," Peled says.
"They demand such prices and such deadlines that it's impossible for factories in the Third World countries to honor their own labor laws."
Peled, who lived in Mill Valley from 1979 to 1996, began making films in 1992 while heading up the Media Alliance in San Francisco. "China Blue" is his fourth film. He made two documentaries about the Middle East, " Inside God's Bunker" and "You, Me, Jerusalem," and one that explores the impact of discount chain stores on American society, "Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town."

Q: Do you think the average American knows where his jeans come from?

A: No. I didn't know where my jeans came from or where any of my clothes came from except for a vague notion. I think we all know they were made in some Third World country. What I set out to do was to make a film about just a couple of these girls so that they became real people. These girls could have been a next-door neighbor or a daughter. Then it's no longer acceptable that they are treated this way. Then people feel guilty and start wanting things to change.

Q: Where did your jeans come from?

A: There aren't many good alternatives. That's for sure, But if you go online, you can find clothes that are made in the U.S.A. I don't like to promote any particular company, but alternatives do exist. But the point is that they are not really viable alternatives for a lot of people because they are not inexpensive. It's a matter of perspective. If you looked at the prices of things 20 years ago, you would see that the price of gas or housing or health services has gone up tremendously while the price of clothing has not. The reason is we are not paying the real price for our clothes. The real price would be to provide the person making them a basic living wage.

Q: "An Inconvenient Truth" was one of the most talked-about films of 2006 and a kind of renaissance for Al Gore. Are documentaries a new political force?

A: I think documentaries have clearly enjoyed a resurgence of popularity and it is becoming a lot easier to get documentaries into the movie theaters. Still, for me the most interesting part is when it goes on TV because that's when millions of people get to see it. I think of my projects as film plus Web site. Film is not a good medium for providing data. It's a good medium for telling stories. When it's on screen, we can flash (www.teddybearfilms.com). I think the power of documentaries in terms of setting up public debate or generating agendas is really more from television.

Q: In the '80s in Marin, you led the nuclear freeze campaign. Now, in the wake of global warming, even environmentalists are talking about reviving nuclear power. Does this worry you?

A: There are a lot of things that worry me in the world and that is certainly one of them. With a lot of those questions - energy consumption is one - when you really go deep enough into them you realize the main problem is really the system overall. To really improve, we need to make drastic changes in our standard of living, our lifestyles, and that's too scary. Why don't we just live in a world where we use less energy?

Q: Are you more hopeful or more skeptical in general than you were in the '80s?

A: I would say overall I am less hopeful. I feel that maybe the overwhelming overarching theme of our time is globalization. It's a very complex issue. It means we have allowed corporate interests to rule more and more of our lives. We are told we live in a democracy where we get to vote on important issues, but the fact is a lot of it has been relegated to the corporate interests.

Q: Do you think something like "China Blue" can change the way Americans shop on a scale big enough to fundamentally change the sweatshop economy?

A: I don't expect that my little film will change the world, but I do find that it makes people think about things they never thought about before. The people who attended the screenings I went to were ready to take action. If there were somebody there who was selling clothes that were made in the U.S.A., most people in the audience would have gone up and bought some clothes. We don't need everybody in America to buy sweatshop-free clothes. There are segments of our population who can't afford to do that. If only 20 percent of the American public would say, "Give us some clothes we would not be ashamed of. We are willing to pay $2 more," the brands would realize there is a market niche there and they would provide that.

Q: What is the alternative to the global economy and cheap labor?

A: Why don't we have a global organization to make these inspections? It's ridiculous that we let these factories police themselves. All these factories are breaking the labor laws, and all these retailers know it. These retailers could eliminate the whole problem in one fell swoop by starting their own factories in China. But they don't want to own a factory in China because they don't want to invest in man and machines. They want to be nimble so that next year they can take their orders to another country where it would be cheaper.

Q: In "Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town," you chose a subject that is also tied to that global economy. Do Americans realize the local impact of globalization?

A: Certainly people realize what Wal-Mart is doing to small-town America. That film really took that head on. I see the two films as the two ends of the same story. It was after making "Store Wars" that it got me thinking of all these cheap goods and cheap clothes - where did they come from? It's all part of the same system.

Q: Do you worry that documentaries like this can wind up preaching to the choir? Is "China Blue" going to play in the red states?

A: I don't think my films preach to the choir. I am very conscious of that when I conceptualize my films. Before I started making it, I looked to see what else has been made on the topic. I saw a bunch of videos that were made on sweatshops. They were all organizing tools for people who were already activists. My film is clearly not that kind of film. I try to tell stories to the general public. The film is not going to play in places where people don't have an interest in documentaries and foreign films. Unfortunately, that has become a stigma for films. Just because they have subtitles people say they don't want to see them. I've seen people come to see it who were maybe on a class assignment for high school, kids. I've seen them be moved and maybe surprised to be moved. This film is about real people with real emotions. That is what people respond to the most.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: It's too early to tell. An old Chinese saying is there are those who know and do not talk and those who talk and do not know. When I have something to present to the world, I'll be glad to talk about it.