This one is an Indian documentary that is a little obscure so I’m rather happy that I managed to find it at all. It was the director Rahul Jain debut film and it has no narration and indeed very little dialogue at all. There are a few very succinct interviews and that’s it. Jain for the most part allows the images to speak for themselves in a manner that is very similar to Tie Xi Qu.

The subject of this film is an unnamed textile factory in Gujarat, India. It appears to be quite large and while it looks decent enough on the outside, conditions inside are dire and gritty. The interior spaces are poorly lit, there are pools of water on the floor and filth is everywhere. Without narration we are left to determine the workers’ tasks ourselves. In some cases, this is obvious as we watch them mix huge vats of dyes or lugging around bundles of cloth. It’s less easy to understand what they’re actually doing when they’re tending to the various machines. Still this is at best dreary, repetitive work and at worst both exhausting and possibly dangerous. What’s especially heartbreaking is that the factory openly employs child labor and one of the children speaks out that it’s best way to learn useful skills for later in life.

In interviews, the workers’ primary complaint is that they have to work 12-hour shifts and they would very much prefer to move to 8-hour ones. There are also details about how the workers need to travel a long distance from the poorest states in India in order to get a job in the factory. One interlocutor comments that a typical worker may not have any savings left from a month of work but at least he would be able to feed himself. Interestingly Jain also speaks to someone to appears to be the boss and seems to filming all this with permission. It seems clear that the boss feels that he has nothing to hide. He acknowledges that wages are on the low side but argues that the skills and work ethic of his current employees are awful compared to those of the past. Though we never hear Jain speak on camera, it’s also clear that the workers want him to lead them in some kind of industrial action to ask for better working conditions.

As with Tie Xi Qu, there is a lot of power just in the images of day to day routines on the factory floor. However whereas in the other film there is a sense of the director scrambling to capture a neighborhood and a way of life that will be going away soon, here the images gain added power from our knowledge that this is still going on in India and there is no expectation that conditions will be improving any time soon. At the same time however, I don’t see this as a convincing critique of capitalism. As the workers themselves explain, they need to travel a great distance undertaking a significant expense of effort and money to take up this job. This indicates that however terrible this job seems to us, it’s still better any of the alternatives available to them. Obviously illegal and unfair methods used by employers to suppress workers organizing themselves to improve their working conditions ought to be opposed, the existence of the factory itself and the jobs it provides seem to me to be a good thing.

Further musing on India’s economic situation is far outside the scope of this post but for a start I will say that the children shown here should be studying in schools and not working in factories, but that’s extreme poverty for you. In any case, I found this to be a fascinating inside look into the workings of a real factory as I doubt most of us would otherwise get a chance to visit one like this in India. I still can’t understand why the factory owner would give permission to Jain to film in the first place.