Made in Bangladesh is a drama about a woman’s struggle to set up a union in a garment factory.
It begins with a co-worker perishing in a workplace fire, obviously taking from real events like the 2012 factory fire disaster in Dhaka. Shimu and her friends feel distraught but helpless. When Shimu is contacted by a local workers’ rights group, she tries to set up a union. But it’s not easy, she needs to get the signatures of 30% of the factory workers, and they have to do so in secret, in fear of management. The whole film follows all the difficulties in just getting to the starting line, just to begin the union to start to fight. From corrupt civil servants, to sexually exploitative managers, to a lack of support at home for fear of the attention it will attract, Shimu and her friends must battle it all.
Made in Bangladesh is a great film, showing ordinary working class women, especially women of colour in a post-colonial-exploitation country, as key agents of their own success in their own stories. This is not a film split into the done-to and the doers, the women are active in solving the issue of their own oppression.
It’s also another great film about the importance of speaking up for your own worth. In one sense, nothing is changed by the end of the film for Shimu, she’s only getting the start of setting up this catalyst for change, but SHE has changed. She goes from feeling powerless, afraid and cowed, to daring, commanding, and insistent on her own rights. This transformation is the real revolution, the thing that those above fear from those below. Because there is a difference in being silenced and remaining silent. It fundamentally changes Shimu to believe in the worth of her own labour, own voice, own self.
To Be A Woman is a short film from the 1950s. It open with that plummy voice, “What of the woman of today? What does she want in the 1950s?” The Pathe News male voice puts forth these questions against an RP female voice setting forth the arguments for equal pay.
You’d think this would be amusing to watch. That outdated method of addressing the viewer directly with authoritative dictates in ‘British Empire’ voice, watching people trip about in black-and-white in clothing from a bygone era, arguing over a won debate. But it’s not. Not least because it isn’t a won debate. People are happy to let the legislation state equal pay for equal work, even if every year every study shows women earning less for similar work performed by men. And women continue to be underrepresented in positions of power in every sector. In fact, it’s a little withering to see, an entire generation on, how identifiable our grandmothers’ issues are with our own.
The truly lovely thing to see is women being called out by name, and highlighted as the first woman to sit on a coal board, the first woman to lead a mixed-gender union, a painter, a composer, a nurse, a pilot, a head teacher, a typist, a machinist, a factory worker. Despite how history will only spit out a few names, as if these exceptional women moved the world on their own, the world was moved by every woman who kicked open a door that was closed to her. Each in their own corner became the first, so no other woman would have to be.
And it’s amazing how much that is said in this would still sound radical today. That the vote was won to materially improve the rights of working women, and those elected on it must be held accountable for this, that workers’ rights are human rights. In 2021 you could post that on Twitter and still get a spewing torrent of resistance and condemnation.
Watching it 70 years on, it may seem a little depressing how familiar the issues are, but it’s also a good reminder, that there have always been women fighting for acknowledgement of their equal humanity, and we have a long tradition to follow in.
Getting Away With Murder(s) asks the question why were the people who carried out the holocaust not brought to justice? Less than 1% of the people who participated in this mass murder were ever brought to trial. Of those, fewer were convicted, and even fewer adequately sentenced. It takes thousands of people to commit a genocide, why were they allowed to go free?
The TLDR of the film is lots of reasons, but primarily indifference. Whether antisemitism because it was Jews, or simply because it wasn’t *me*, the living were more concerned with their lives than the dead. Plus, history is always marching forward, and in the century of infinite war, the next one started almost before the old ended, with the Cold War absorbing everyone’s attention. And because the dead can do nothing for you, whereas the living can still be made useful. So those with power are not only able to kill their victims, and attempt to erase their crimes, but also benefit from the knowledge and skills they acquired doing so, to make themselves attractive to future employers and benefactors. Plus also, the state will always be very reticent to prosecute people for carrying out the orders of the state, no matter which state it is.
After watching this absolutely fascinating and utterly horrifying film, you are almost more impressed that they even prosecuted the ones they did. Because it was all uphill, with only surface-level shows of support, and resisted at every level of civil and political society. And it was seemingly mostly driven by pressure groups, activists, and a few well-placed firebrands like Fritz Bauer, Simon Wiesenthal, and Benjamin Ferencz. Literally without those pushing, absolutely nothing would have been done at all.
Politicians, civil servants, and police don’t like the idea that they might be prosecuted for the actions they carry out. Americans resisted the notion of prosecuting based on the violation of human rights, because they knew it might open themselves up for prosecution for the mistreatment and lynching of African-Americans. Ditto Britain for the many of its own subjects it had massacred and abused. There was a fear that by holding Nazis accountable, they were picking at a thread which might undo themselves.
But also, this is about widespread public outrage, and how the public appetite for justice is instrumental in seeing it done. Nothing gets done without it. This film shows how it takes thousands of people to make a genocide with their own hands, and how it takes thousands afterward to raise up to demand justice. No one does either alone.
The filmmaker notes that some occupied territories did try mass-resistance to extermination attempts, such as in Denmark where every gentile wore a yellow star so as to make Jews indistinguishable on the streets, and evacuated almost all Danish Jewry to Sweden, or in Albania where the predominately Muslim population hid and protected almost all the country’s Jews. But equally, there were places where antisemitism ran so strong that there was willing, and even enthusiastic participation in the genocide, such as in Slovakia, which actually paid the Germans to take Jews off their hands, and in Lithuania, which saw massacres of Jewish communities ahead of the Nazi invading front, in anticipation for what would become permissible under their reign.
The truth was, it would take money to prosecute thousands of war criminals appropriately, and there was not the inclination in many countries to do it at all, and a squeeze for resources even when public support would permit it. Europe was in ruins after the war, and everyone wanted to think about a brighter tomorrow, rather than dwell on the darkness of the past.
But justice delayed is justice denied. It has been often said, but is never truer here. Because Jewish calls for prosecution were told to quiet while the country rebuilt. Then quiet while the Cold War enemy was at the door. Then quiet when they were told it was too long ago to be tried now. All the while slowly waiting for them to die off, and become as quiet as the dead they defend. And now the last remaining Nazis and their prosecutors are reaching 100. And time silences the issue once and for all. Justice delayed is justice denied.
All throughout the film, the warning rings clear, if people get away with murder, it shows everyone you can get away with murder; and if people get away with mass murder, it shows everyone you can get away with mass murder. Most people who carried out the killing of 6 million Jews died old, comfortable, and surrounded by their loved ones. What fear has anyone of carrying out the next genocide?
I never saw Belle when it first came out coz I thought it looked gash. But since seeing it analysed in The Psychosis of Whiteness, I’ve been a little interested in what the complete piece looked like. And tonight it was being shown as part of Black History Month with a panel from CRER to provide some much needed context.
To be honest, this was the best way to see it, in an audience fully aware of its inadequacies, and treating it as Jane Austen fanfic more than anything approaching historical truth. Everyone booed the baddies, clapped the goodies, and gave a fierce snap whenever an eviscerating line was laid down. Treating it as escapist fantasy with a black female lead is probably the best way to watch this.
In some ways, I don’t know what to really add to what you can probably imagine about Belle just from watching the trailer. It is very loosely based on the life of the real Dido Belle, the biracial daughter of a Scottish aristocrat and an enslaved African woman, acknowledged despite illegitimacy, and raised in her father’s family estate. But I imagine all resemblance to the actual life of Dido Belle ends about there. Directed by one of the few Black British female filmmakers out there, it is understandable to want to make a happy story full of romance and courtroom drama and period costume, that reflects the little girls who adore this genre and are Black. But maybe if there were more Black British female filmmakers out there, who were allowed to make big budget films with Black British female leads, this film could be allowed to settle amiably into the period drama romance genre without needing to, being criticised for, and ultimately failing to fulfil a story which is made to carry such weight in terms of representation of racism in British society.
Much like I spent the duration of North and South shouting at the television, “Bastard! Bastard!”, and cheered when the strikers looked to be about to stone to death the capitalist cuntoes, so too did I spend the entirety of Belle with a sharp smirk at every white person, muttering under my breath, “Wow, what a hero(!)”. Seriously fuck all these people. This is another movie in which white people use the only black character as an opportunity to grow and learn. This film is barely about Belle, it’s about the uncle who raises her, and is eventually persuaded to act like less of an arsehole about having a biracial ward. Belle is merely a mirror for the white characters to see themselves in and congratulate themselves on what they see.
It is, of course, totally whitewashed and sanitised, with the actual suffering of black people erased. Slavery is discussed but never seen. The court case Belle’s defacto father presides over is about the murder of 130 African slaves, but the names of these people is never used or known. Belle’s mother is entirely absent from the film, and no one even thinks to ask whether there was consent between her father, an aristocratic naval officer, and her mother, an enslaved woman.
I didn’t go see this first time round because I knew it would stick in my craw. So I recommend only watching it as escapist fantasy. Maybe pair it with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Know that what you are seeing is Black representation within the British tradition, and a challenge to absolutely nothing.
The Deer King is one of those movies whose message becomes eerily prescient by the time it’s released. First written in 2014 and adapted in 2017, no one could have known that a story about a plague becoming a focal point for political unrest and ethnic tension would become so unfortunately relevant upon its release in 2021.
The Deer King was written by an ethnographer whose studies of indigenous people and their resistance to oppression inspired her to write a fantasy novel based on folk understanding of disease. Unlike the medical model of disease, folk understanding takes in ideas from religion, magic, superstition, bloodlines, people’s heritage, and all cultural meanings contextual to a disease event.
So The Deer King is set in the land of Aquafra, a country invaded and dominated by the Empire of Zol. Afrafra includes many different peoples, including village farmers as well as herding nomads. In the north, where the Fire Horse region resisted invasion, dwelt people who hunted with wolves. From this place issued the disease know as Black Wolf Fever, which brought the Zol forces to a halt. The Lone Antlers are fearsome warriors, nomadic deer herders who ride their deer into battle, and were known for their fierce resistance to Zol rule.
Many years after Aquafra’s annexe, our story begins with Van, a slave in the salt mines known for his strength of body and of character. When a new outbreak of Black Wolf Fever devastates the mine, he is the lone survivor along with an orphaned child. He escapes to freedom and is taken in by some settled nomads. In this warm and happy community are the different people of Aquafra, including ethnic Zol who now call Aquafra their home. Here, he begins life anew, bringing knowledge and skills on deer rearing, and bonds with his orphaned charge, Luna, who becomes his new daughter. And his silence and solitariness begin to unfold, and he is like a man come back to life again.
Meanwhile the leader of Zol in Aquafra, the Lord of this tributary state, is dying of Black Wolf Fever. His successor is a fair man, with respect for the Aquafra people, but who is pressured on all sides. First from the Emperor who is coming to the region to visit and who wants to make a point of going to Fire Horse Village as a show of it as included within Zol’s rule. Second from the Zol armed forces who see the re-emergence of Black Wolf Fever as a biological warfare attack. Thirdly from the ethnic Aquafra political establishment who want to ensure the anti-Aquafra sentiment the plague is stoking doesn’t jeopardise their position and standing.
The last strand to talk about is that ethnic Aquafra political establishment, a subjugated king and his adviser, who conspire with the Fire Horse leader to unleash Black Wolf Fever in time for the Emperor’s visit, to exterminate Zol people in Aquafra as an act of ethnic cleansing, and a means to destroying the Zol army, and paving the way for Aquafra independence once more. However, neither entirely trusts the other, with the Fire Horse leader being well aware that the king’s actions are self-serving, and seeing this plague more as the justice of the land itself, than a tool to wield in petty squabblings for power.
That’s not the plot – that’s the concept. That’s the TLDR of where the movie starts essentially. So, as you can see, it’s like a season of Game of Thrones compacted into 2 hours.
There is so much in this movie. Themes on race, politics, religion, society, and societal breakdown in times of stress. It is honestly weird to think this was written before coronavirus had even been heard of. Because it’s like someone has made a Japanese fantasy film about the coronavirus, so many things are analogous, that it’s actually more creepy that they thought this stuff up on their own, then it happened. Zol priests refuse to take treatment, religious exemption if you will, believing that their own godly understanding of disease can be combatted through ritual and prayer. All Aquafraese are blamed for spreading the plague, as theirs is the country of origin, and this stokes racial prejudice from the Zol. Politicians on every side seek to use the disease and its attendant crisis for their own ends, while doctors diligently just try to keep the living from death. People ascribe a moral meaning to those who perish from the disease, while in reality, it kills indiscriminately among those not immune.
The Chambermaid is a film about Eve, an indigenous worker in a luxury hotel in Mexico. The film is shot from entirely within the hotel. It is as though the director wants to see if you can tell the story of someone’s full humanity through the keyhole of their work. Because work is where you come to deny your humanity, dehumanise and mechanise yourself. And this is doubly so for women in customer service who must never get frustrated or angry, seem tired or resentful, or express need and desire.
Much of the film is dialogueless, with Eve running between rooms to get her floor finished on time. You watch her smooth down comforters with a broom handle, fold toilet paper, spin lampshades round for a dusting. It gives you time to see what you never normally see, the hidden skill and strain of work which leaves behind a perfectly pressed capsule of comfort.
The little time to herself you see Eve have is usually hiding in the toilet – which identify! God knows what it’s like to be like, “I’m sitting in here pretending I’m taking a half-hour long shit. I don’t care if they think I have a bowel condition. I need a fucking break.” She plays on her phone, texts home, and just takes time to breathe.
She calls home near the end of her shift to announce she is on her way to pick up her kid, or to hear his voice if she’s pulling a double. Her home life is unseen, as it is meant to be in a place of work. This means that the film shows her performing all these tasks for others, but the thing which is most important to her is given no space.
Eve is remarked on by a number of characters as shy. Her reserve is one of her most valuable skills as she is able to handle almost any customer interaction without betraying any emotion. Yet is she really shy or does her job just provide no outlet for expression of her inner self? We get glimpses of more as the film goes on, passion in flirtations with a window cleaner, and rage in frustrations when thwarted.
And the strange dislocation of being entirely focused on the customer experience without ever coming into contact with them, brings up the necessary element of human interaction. When people talk about a rewarding job, how is that formulated when the better you do your job, the less likely your customers will think of your existence at all? And what about the humanising effect inherent in human interaction, the basic acknowledgement of your existence that comes with visibility, a cardinal sin for ‘the help’?
Eve does manage to find little interactions with her customers, or on a more basic level, the people round about her. The Japanese photographer whose books and photos she leafs through, whose strange sweeties she takes, and who leaves his room completely tidy, bed stripped and folded, with a flower as appreciation for her. There is a dialogue even without meeting, in the way that they leave the room for her and she leaves the room for them.
A film that manages to stay engaging despite documenting repetition and tasks deemed ‘menial’, which accords full humanity to its subject even within its own structure as work as a peephole, and in which visibility is one of the most basic exchanges of power.
Fannie’s Film is a documentary short focusing on Fannie, an elderly African-American woman who works as a cleaner in a gym in the 1980s. She talks about her life and her work, as the film shows her picking up towels, wiping down mirrors, and dusting the blinds.
The visuals are only of the gym, the skinny white New Yorkers at the height of the fitness fad contrast with Fannie’s older firmer-set black figure. The underlying power dynamics are obvious. But the vocals are of Fannie describing an entire life beyond this one. She talks about her childhood, which she sees as a time of abundance. Despite not having many modern-day conveniences, she says her father was a real family man, and spent whatever he made on giving his kids anything they wanted. When she grew up and married, it was also to a very loving man, and she had a happy marriage. She always worked so she could maintain her independence, but they were comfortable enough that it wasn’t a necessity. She talks about her spiritual life, seeing herself as blessed by God, having been given a very easy life, and breaks into hymns from time to time.
The film has an awareness of the power structures in which we find Fannie, a woman doing women’s work which is given low status and pay, which is deliberately made invisible to those who rely on it. It speaks so much to race, to gender, to class. Yet it is equally important to show how resistance within those power structures can be as simple as refusing to be defined by them.
You remember The Corporation? Documentary movie released back in 2003, it put forward that if corporate personhood was a thing, then the corporation would be diagnosed a psychopath. Big favourite in charity shop DVD sections near universities all throughout the 2000s. It made you start reading and then swiftly abandon the book No Logo, remember?
This is ‘The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel’, of how corporations have rebranded in the past quarter-century to co-opt tackling social issues to deflect from scrutiny of their actions, and mitigate moral outrage at their relentless pursuit of profit at any cost to human life or the earth itself. This is not simply the greenwashing that takes place in advertising, although that is a massive part of their charm offensive, but how they have positioned big business as the solutions to the very problems they’ve created. So this means touting the idea that more investment is needed in massive fossil fuel companies so they can ‘carry’ us over the hump to where renewable energy is ready to meet all our needs. This means social enterprise and public partnership being the solution to underfunded public services, without mentioning that the tax avoidance committed by those companies is what is responsible for that deficit. It means shaking your head about how wasteful and incompetent governments have failed to create wealth for their poverty-stricken citizens, and suggesting that maybe government should be run more like a business, by business people, with as much privatised as possible.
Like most call-to-action movies, it’s really comprised of two parts. The shit stick, and the dangling carrot. The shit stick is when you are repeatedly whacked over the head with stuff that you already kinda know, but which is horrifying when you think about it all at once. The dangling carrot is the bit at the end where they tell you to recycle or whatever. This film’s shit stick is very well put together, if somewhat heavy-handed in its presentation, coz, you know, American. But its dangling carrot is maybe even more depressing. Coz it is so anaemic and underwhelming, and seems to divert the energy of groundswell grassroots movements back into the broken political system that failed to prevent this situation in the first place.
Bleak as it was, I was riding with this film all the way through the corporate manslaughter, and ecological devastation, and undermining of any form of accountable governance, and the creation of the pandemic through a reckless, destructive and dangerously intrusive food industry, and the breakdown of social cohesion after years of poverty and hopelessness. And what actually made me hop off the wagon was when at the end, the upswing of hope was for us to pour our energy and money into electing people like Bernie fucking Sanders. I was just like, “NOOOOOOOOO!!!” All the anarchists that live in the back of my head were screaming. Mate, you have just got through talking about 25 years of history where a revolving door of people’s faces on the front this machine, Democrat and Republican, have not changed one iota of the exponential expansion of corporate greed. Why, oh, why, do you think this will be different?
And I know it’s the American way, to pour your faith back into democracy, but the form of democracy you have is so archaic and insufficient. Why are you choosing what has not protected you in the first place? Also, you can’t go, “the answer is grassroots movements, grassroots movements, grassroots movements”, then be like, “Stop! Everybody pour all their energy and resources into this one person to represent us.”
I dunno. The older I get the less faith I have in representative democracies. People campaigning against poverty boasting about how they raised £10 million for Bernie’s campaign. Like, how much could that kind of money have done if it had been spent actually just directly on people in poverty? Like, stop electing people to solve the problem, and just solve the problem. If the schools are bad, organise to fix the school, don’t organise to collect money, to create a campaign, to elect someone, to sit on the board, to make decisions, to fix the school.
I mean, at one point one of the beacons of light to usher in this new dawn was the election of Sadiq Khan as mayor of London. Are you fucking kidding me? Is this how low we’ve set our sights? He’s a Labour MP, he sat as part of the government under Tony Blair, that grinning muppet you see at the Davos summit, rubbing shoulders with the billionaire CEO of JP Morgan Chase. That’s the outsider voice who’s about to turn the tables on this shit? Sitting in Scotland that elected Labour for a century, and a century on still has the highest poverty rates in Western Europe, you do just wanna ask, “What are you on about?”
Ugh. Anyway.
It’s a decent enough movie for analysing the economic devastation that’s been wreaked the past few years. It’s gonna be a firm favourite of charity shop DVD sections near universities for many years to come, along with Feel The Bern tshirts.
On The Line follows 3 deportees from the United States to Mexico. All have spent decades and decades living in the US, and have nothing in Mexico. They live in Tijuana, close enough to the American border to see San Diego on a clear day.
The heartbreak of this film is of how near, and yet so far, they are from their home. The deportees have not integrated into Mexican life, they don’t want to. They spend every moment thinking about and working towards getting home to the US. Although they can all speak Spanish, they speak English in their homes. They listen to San Diego FM on the radio, watch the news on CNN on the tv, and they work in call centres phoning American businesses and homes to sell products for American companies, just at a fraction of the wage they would get in the US.
Ricardo is a veteran. Which just blows my mind. They don’t need to you to have papers to sign up and die for your country, but you do if you want to come back home and get a piece of the good life you fought to protect. Fucking wild. Americans, and especially the Republicans, are so ‘Support the troops!’ and ‘the military is sacred!”, especially when it comes to discussing the point of a war or challenging budget expenditure, but they are deporting veterans?
Ricardo still holds services for the fallen along with other deported veterans, standing to attention and reporting rank. He works online, spending all day speaking to other Americans going about their day, and when he finishes he watches American tv. He keeps himself in this bubble of America. And it all seems so real, he can watch what they watch, see the weather forecast, listen to the same music. It is so close to home. And yet it’s not. He lives in this island in his flat, full of unpacked boxes, and ignores all of Mexico outside his door.
Sergio also works in a call centre. He is saving up whatever he can to find some way back to his wife, his kids. His whole life is in American and it is like he has been picked up and dropped off in a foreign land. He was brought to America at the age of 1 by his parents. He has never known anything other than America. He is painfully aware that he is living in exile, while his kids grow up without him, while his wife has to find a way to raise their family alone.
Rocio is a grandma whose son serves in the America military. Her boy is off fighting for his country while Mum is being deported to live in a broken-down shack without running water, all alone. Again, everything seems so close. She can facetime her daughters and speak to her grandkids. She can open her home security app on her phone and see the house she left behind, watch her elderly mother cooking meals. But she can never eat the meals, or hug her grandkids. Her daughters are eventually able to come and visit her, and they are struck dumb at their mother living in this crumbling one-room building.
Throughout all of this, despair runs like a torrent. And a barely suppressed rage at the injustice of it. Ricardo had a criminal record as a result of the heroin addiction he developed serving in Vietnam, but has been clean for decades. It is when he is clean and approaching retirement, that’s when they deport him. Sergio also had drug offences from when he was a teenager. But they deport him once he has turned his life around and is a hard-working family man. He even had papers, but they had been lost at one point. And Rocio, she had no criminal record at all. She worked almost half a century in America, put her kids through uni, sent her son off to war, and then they deported her.
It’s all so arbitrary, and so stupid, and so needless. That is what is so disgusting. The destruction of their lives, the tearing apart of their family, leaving them to die alone in a foreign land in a state of poverty – it’s not for any reason. No one believes Rocio, a grandmother and family pillar, is some cartel mafioso. No one believes Sergio poses a danger to society, with his business and kids. No one thinks Ricardo, a Vietnam vet, is a people-trafficker. It’s obvious, and everyone sees it for what it is – ethnically cleansing the USA of as many Latinos as possible.
The bitterness and resentment towards the US this will drive into the hearts of people will last for generations. The sense of insecurity – of Rocio’s grandkids watching their grandmother snatched away after a half-hour hearing – is going to leave ripples that will stretch out beyond sight. This is a trauma that is going to have, and is already having, long-lasting consequences.
The Man Who Sold His Skin is based on Delvoye’s Tim, an artist who tattooed his work on a guy’s back, a man who now sits in exhibit halls displaying it. In this film, the canvass is Sam Ali, a Syrian refugee who sells his back to a famous artist to gain safe passage to Europe.
This film is chocca with themes. It’s about art and its commodification, the devaluing of human life in comparison with the arbitrary value placed on status symbols, religious metaphor with the visa as salvation, and Faustian deals which bring you closer to Hell as you approach an imagined Heaven.
It also has a very human story at the centre of it, that of Sam and Abeer, two young people in love at the start of the war. Sam is impetuous, impatient, eager to get married. Abeer reveals that she loves him while they sit together on a train, and Sam passionately declares to the carriage that he loves her and asks for a sheikh to marry them there and then. Unfortunately he also in his exuberance adds a few words about the optimism for a new age through the Revolution.
Thus they are separated. Sam is arrested by security forces, and has to flee to Lebanon. As war approaches, Abeer marries a man who is a foreign diplomat who can take her abroad to safety. Maybe Hell is just being given time to sit with your mistakes.
Sam cannot accept that their love is doomed, and meets a famous artist who says he can take him to Belgium where Abeer is. He can make him rich. He can bring him out of the margins of society and make him famous and valued. “Call me Mephistopheles,” he says.
He tattoos Sam’s back with a visa stamp, turning him into a work of international art. As a human being he could do nothing and go nowhere. As an object, he has international passage and is valued as precious.
But will it actually get Sam what he wants? Or will being in Belgium only bring home just how out of reach a married woman is? Will this visa free him or mark him for permanent ownership?
