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Big Boys Gone Bananas!*

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Grocery

Big Boys Gone Bananas!*
A documentary film directed by Fredrik Gertten for WG Film AG, Sweden
Free trailer and on-demand stream embedded above. Search online for other streaming options here.
The second of two films on this topic. The first is “Bananas!*”. See our page on this here. See the films’ website here.

Swedish documentary filmmaker Fredrik Gertten and his small film company team are looking forward to the premiere of their courtroom documentary Bananas!* at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It follows a class action case in the California courts where a group of Nicaraguan Banana farm workers hold the Dole corporation accountable for their sexual impotence by making them use an agrochemical that had been banned because it caused it. Their case is put together by a California-based attorney, and the documentary includes grainy in-court testimony not only by the farmers but also by the Dole bosses who made the decision to continue using that agrochemical. The film documents a success story, more or less, with significant financial compensation being awarded to the workers. This is a test case. The first of its kind. So more cases will follow. More costs for Dole. More embarrassment. So Dole fights back, mounting a sophisticated public relations campaign to discredit the case (charging its lawyer with fraud) and the film (claiming it’s uncritically promoting this lawyer’s fraud). This campaign starts before the film has been screened. By people who have not seen it. News articles appear reporting that the film is a fraud. The festival is forced to withdraw it from competition, to show it at a remote theatre, and the festival director has to read out a disclaimer before it’s shown there. Then negative reviews start to appear as soon as it’s seen. Can this seemingly coordinated effort to silence corporate critique succeed? What would you do as a filmmaker if this happened to you? Gertten does what he knows best. He turns his camera on and makes a film about Dole’s attempts to discredit his film. He steps out from behind the camera to become its central character. Unbelievable things are happening to him, to the people he works with, and to the film they made together. But his film company had taken out an insurance policy that allowed them to pay for expensive legal help to fight back. They cleverly coordinate an counter-information and crowndfunding campaign. And a surprising international collection of allies come to their aid. Dole’s efforts to censor Bananas!* are a complete failure and, more than anything, make it and this Big Boys sequel a 100% must see double-bill for anyone interested in trade justice actvism. Read below to see how this story unfolds. It’s a genuine ‘David vs. Goliath’ story. You could never make this up! There’s so much to learn from this. Buckle up.

Page reference: Camilla Muirhead, Katie Lambert, Katie Joyce, Will Sensecall, Izzie Snowden, Matt Creagh & Harry Cousens (2020) Big Boys Gone Bananas!*. followthethings.com/big-boys-gone-bananas.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 1 hour 53 minutes.

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Ghosts

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Grocery

Ghosts
A documentary-drama film written by Nick Broomfield, Jez Lewis & Hsiao-Hung Pai, directed by Nick Broomfield for Beyond Films
Official trailer embedded above. Available on Box of Broadcasts (with institutional login) here. Search online here for other streaming availability. The movie website archive is here.

Documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield is known for his quirky, in-front-of-camera documentaries but, after a 2004 disaster where 23 Chinese migrant workers picking cockles were drowned by a fast-incoming tide in the UK’s Morecamble Bay, he decides to make a docu-drama to show what happened and why. This is a tale of people smuggling, modern slavery and violent, corrupt gangmasters sourcing and providing cheap slave labour in the UK to pick vegetables like spring onions and seafood like cockles for sale in mainstream supermarkets (which the film names). The script was co-written with Hsiao-Hung Pai – a Taipei-heritage UK journalist and writer – and was researched through the writers’ visit to China to visit the victims’ families. The film starred former illegal immigrant Chinese non-actors working with an improvised script, using traditional and undercover filmmaking, and ends with a plea for audience members to donate to a fund to help the dead workers’ families pay their people-smuggling debts. The tale is told from the perspective of a female worker called Ai Qin. She and her compatriots speak in Mandarin so that that ‘Ghosts’ – their white gangmasters – can’t understand they are mocking them. In the final scene, just before Ai Qin drowns, she calls her son in China to sing him a farewell lullaby on her mobile phone. The film encourages viewers to ask who is to blame for their deaths? The migrant workers? The people smugglers and gangmasters? The supermarkets? The government? In the UK? In China? Ghosts was made to be put to use, and to have a positive impact, on public attitudes to migrant workers, on the law and on the victims’ families. In contrast to a documentary film, a docu-drama can script and film anything, anyone, anywhere. So a fuller picture of the challenges that workers and trade justice activists face can be pieced together to provoke change.

Page reference: Harriet Allen, Etienne Heaume, Lizzie Heeley, Rosie Hedger, Sam Johnson, Olivia McGregor & Lucy Webber (2025) Ghosts. followthethings.com/ghosts.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 104 minutes.

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A Week In A Toxic Waste Dump

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Recycle my waste

A Week In A Toxic Waste Dump
A documentary film presented by Reggie Yates, produced by Harriet Morter for BBC TV.
Available in full above (with ads). Available on the BBC’s iPlayer platform without ads (with login) here. Search online for streaming options here.

Agbogbloshie is a notorious e-waste dump on the outskirts of Accra, the capital city of Ghana. It’s where Western electronics ‘go to die’. It’s where migrant workers from the North of Ghana move to take up low paid and dangerous work recycling this waste. They recover valuable scrap metals like copper from discarded electrical devices, most famously by burning the plastic or rubber coatings from their wires. The smoke is acrid, poisonous. Processing this waste here has polluted the soil, the water table, the air, and the health of the people who work and live here. It’s a textbook case of the evils of Western consumption. In terms of toxic landscapes, some say, Agbogbloshie is in the same league as Chernobyl. In 2017, Reggie Yates (a British Radio and TV celebrity with Ghanaian heritage) spends a week here. It’s for an episode of a documentary TV series in which he tries to understand the lives lived by people less fortunate than himself by living with them for a week, doing the work that they do, sleeping where they sleep, eating what they eat, and being followed around by a film crew to capture every moment. In Agbogbloshie, he gets to know a group of ‘burner boys’ who are in their 20s called Razak, Awal, Yahro Muhammed and their chief. They show him what they do, burning the plastic off wires, dousing the bright orange flames in puddles of water in the mud, bagging up the bare copper, and selling it on for pennies. As Reggie gets to know these young men, he starts to care about them, becomes concerned about how they can support their families, and their children, on such low wages earned from work that will shorten their lives. They have serious health problems already. He wants viewers in the UK to feel culpable. Most don’t have a clue where their discarded electrical devices go to die. And the damage that this waste can do to people less fortunate than them in poorer countries. Like these ‘burner boys’ in Ghana. Lots of Western journalists and photographers have visited Agbogbloshie to tell this same story. Many seem to have met Razal, Awal, Yahro and Muhammed. They’ve acted as fixers, helping these visitors to tell the story they have heard about by providing testimony and burning plastic and rubber in photogenic ways. People who are in touch with the ‘burner boys’ say that they appreciated Reggie’s efforts to muck in, they thought he was cool. But waste academics in Ghana and overseas, as well as local commentators, have a problem with this story that Reggie and everyone else visits to tell. It’s one of those narratives of exploitation that has a questionable origin, quickly becomes iconic, and attracts visitors to tell ready-made versions of it over and over again. It’s a trope. Bad things happen in the Global South. Impoverished workers are suffering. Unthinking consumers in the global North are responsible for this. The media tells the story using authentic found characters with whom a celebrity presenter is able to spend time and to empathise. The audience is invited to empathise with the presenter empathising with the found characters. This encourages powerful emotional and practical responses, debates about the causes of the problem – like capitalism – potential solutions – like an industrial waste plant – and problems with the potential solutions – the ‘burner boys’ would suffer. But what if researchers and on-the-ground commenters reported that Agbogbloshie is quite a small dump, and that the e-waste processed there was mainly from Ghana? There’s next to nothing about the international waste supply chain in this film. What if the dump had been demolished in 2021, partly because of the toxic reputation that these repeated media exposés had given the place? And what if most of the online debate about this documentary had taken place two or three years after the dump had closed? Reggie’s documentary was published on YouTube in 2023 and 2024: giving it a worldwide audience that it had never originally had but also generating a huge fuss about a place that no longer existed. Everyone seem to agree that Reggie is cool, a genuinely empathetic person, but why didn’t the team behind his film seem to have done their homework? A very different story could – and maybe should – have been told.

Page reference: Lucian Harford (2025) Ghana: a Week In A Toxic Waste Dump. followthethings.com/ghana-a-week-in-a-toxic-waste-dump.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 77 minutes.

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Waste Land

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Recycle my waste

Waste Land
A documentary film starring Vik Muniz, soundtrack by Moby, directed by Lucy Walker for Almega Projects & 02 Films.
Trailer embeded abive. Search online for streaming options here.

“When we throw out rubbish, it is easy to assume that it somehow vanishes. In fact, of course, it largely goes to landfill sites such as Jardim Gramacho in Rio De Janeiro: the world’s biggest dump, a huge, undulating, foul-smelling, seagull-covered landscape of garbage which is home to about 3,000 people, who work all day picking out material that can be sold on to commercial recycling companies. Uneaten food found there is gratefully consumed. [Director] Walker follows [Brazilian-heritage, New York based artist Vik] Muniz as he works on a project creating portraits of the pickers, using the materials from this site, which will be sold at auction, with the profits going to the pickers themselves, or rather their representative campaigning group” (Source: Bradshaw 2011, np link).

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Waste Land (holding page). followthethings.com/waste-land.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: tbc minutes.

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The First Ever Pacemaker To Speak For Itself

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Health & Beauty

The First Ever Pacemaker To Speak For Itself
Undergraduate coursework made and recorded by Jennifer Hart
Images of the pacemaker and packaging submitted is in the slideshow above, the song is embedded below.

The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Exeter is to make a personal connection between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the world who made the things they buy. These are the people who help you to be you, followthethings.com CEO Ian tells them. So choose a commodity that matters to you, that’s an important part of your identity, that you couldn’t do without. Think about its component parts, its materials, and what properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming’ it. Student Jennifer Hart feels guilty about the conflict minerals in her mobile phone. Then she finds that the heart pacemaker her mum is having fitted also contains those minerals. It’s a lifesaving operation. How can she reconcile her mum’s suffering and that of these minerals’ miners? How best can she express her feelings about this technological object? By making a pacemaker that knows what she knows, feels what she feels, and can sing about it. A pacemaker that can express a huge thank you.

Page reference: Jennifer Hart, J. (2014) The First Ever Pacemaker To Speak For Itself. followthethings.com/pacemaker.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated listening & reading time: 10 minutes.

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Phone Story

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Electronics

Phone Story
An iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad game created by Paolo Pedercini & Michael Pineschi for Molleindustria in partnership with the Yes Lab.
Banned from the App Store. Google Play archived page here. Play online here. Game website here.

Imagine you’re on Apple’s App Store looking for a new game to play on your iPhone or iPad in September 2011. You see one called Phone Story. Its levels show how your iPhone or iPad were made. The rare metals that make them work so quickly – like Coltan – are extracted from the soil in the Democratic Republic of The Congo by children. The devices are made in a factory in China where the regime is so relentless that workers jump to their deaths from the roof. When a new model comes out, people queue for days and it seems they would run across a busy highway to get to the store before someone else. And then there’s all the e-waste that is generated when the phones that are replaced get thrown away. So, how do you progress through the levels? You’re a soldier who has to bash kids on the back of the head if their Coltan-digging slows. You’re ambulance crew trying to catch workers trying to jump to their deaths from the factory roof. You get the picture. This ‘first anti-iPhone iPhone game’ is hilariously cruel, tasteless, offensive, meta. But it’s 100% based on what’s happening in Apple’s supply chain right now. And what’s more offensive: the game or what it depicts? 901 people pay 99cents and download it. But it’s only available for 4 days, before Apple remove it. People speculate. How on earth did it get there in the first place? And what does its removal mean for free speech? Phone Story went viral as the ‘game Apple didn’t want you to play’. But, you could still play it on your Android phone or computer. You can still do the latter, here. How well would you want to do? What does it mean to get a high score?

Page reference: Eeva Kemppainen, Charlotte Edwards, Toby Bain, Wilhelm Wrede, Sophie Biddulph & Jamie Hall (2012) Phone Story. followthethings.com/phonestory.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 46 minutes.

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Santa’s Workshop

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Gifts & Seasonal

Santa’s Workshop
An NGO Report written by Krista Bjurling for Swedwatch and a documentary directed by Lotta Ekelund & Krista Bjurling and produced by Lotta Ekelund for Lotta Films and The Fair Trade Center.
Screenshot slideshow embedded above. Download the report here. Search online to stream the film here.

Swedish toy companies and retailers seem sure that the things they have ‘Made in China’ are produced ethically. But what can they know about working conditions from audit reports and their own factory visits? NGO Swedwatch travels to China to find out, working with local labour activists to write a report and make a short film. What they find may temporarily ruin Christmas, but can it also change the ways that consumers and companies source toys in the future? As one commenter put it, ‘It’s fascinating to watch the blame being pushed around. It’s the worker’s fault, no, it’s the factories’ fault, no, it’s the client’s fault and last but not least, it’s the customer’s fault. The head in the sand attitude is quite remarkable.’ What’s fascinating to us is that, despite one union official in the film asking consumers NOT to stop buying the toys that the workers make, for some audience members that’s the only way to respond. So what other ways can audiences react? How can filmmakers control this? Will there always be audience members who simply want to disengage?

Page reference: Matthew Chambers, Millie Daglish, Sophie Rendell, George Stapleton, Georgie Thompson & Franziska Nuss (2024) Santa’s Workshop. followthethings.com/santasworkshop.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 37 minutes.

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Primark – On The Rack

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Fashion

Primark – on the rack
A documentary film presented by Tom Heap & produced by Frank Simmonds with Dan McDougall for BBC TV’s Panorama series.
Screenshot slideshow of the contested scene embedded above. Watch on Box of Broadcasts (with institutional login) here.

The BBC produces an exposé of cheap clothing retailer Primark. It finds children making its clothes, and sewing and testing their sequins, in factories, slums and refugee camps in India. Primark is asked to contribute to the film before it’s shown. Instead, they decide to cut ties with the supply chains featured, then launch a website to counter the film’s claims. They research the film’s research to pick apart its claims, and then complain to the BBC that one 45 second scene (the one in the screenshots above) is fake. Their critic-silencing strategy has mixed success. The BBC is forced to admit that it cannot be 100% sure that the scene wasn’t faked, and the Panorama team are forced to hand back an award they were given for the film. But Primark’s persistent public attempts to silence this investigative journalism draws attention – for years – to the company’s reputation as the ‘poster boy of child labour in the UK’. Supporters of the film highlight the other 3,555 minutes of the film that Primark didn’t claim the producers had faked? Then, 5 years after the film was broadcast, the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapses and over a thousand garments workers are crushed to death making high street clothes. Journalists, filmmakers and others keep this tragedy relentlessly in the news. UK newspaper headlines refer to this as the ‘Primark factory’. There’s no way that this footage is fake. Primark has to react differently this time.

Page reference: Kate Adley, Richard Keeble, Pippa Russell, Noora Stenholm, William Strang and Tuuli Valo (2025) Primark – on the rack. followthethings.com/primark-on-the-rack.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 124 minutes.

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The Song Of The Shirt

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Fashion

The Song Of The Shirt
A poem written by Thomas Hood, published in Punch magazine.
Original publication in Punch included above.

Curiosity and concern about the poverty of the people who make everyday commodities is as old as capitalism itself. One of the most iconic and influential examples in this genre is a poem called ‘The Song Of The Shirt’ which was published in the satirical British magazine Punch in 1843. This was 24 years before Karl Marx published the first volume of Capital, with its famous opening chapter on the commodity. The subject of the poem is a woman working in East London making linen shirts for the city’s well-to-do men. It contains lines that wouldn’t be out of place in Twenty-First Century trade justice activism: ‘Oh Men, with Sisters dear! O! Men! With mothers and wives! It’s not linen you’re wearing out. But other creatures’ lives’. ‘The Song Of The Shirt’ went viral through the media of its time, being reprinted and discussed in countless newspapers, pamphlets and books across Great Britain and overseas, often with accompanying illustrations of its subject at work. It also crossed over into ‘Song Of The Shirt’ paintings, songs and plays. But how did the poverty of seamstresses come to the surface, here, at this time? How did this poem become so popular and influential? What can we learn from it today?

Page reference: Rachael Midlen & Charlotte Brunton (2014) The Song Of The Shirt (taster). followthethings.com/the-song-of-the-shirt.shtml (last accessed <add date here>)

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes.

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Plastic Bag

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My shopping bag | Recycle my waste

Plastic Bag
A short film directed by Ramin Bahrani and narrated by Werner Herzog for ITVS’s Futurescapes series.
Published on YouTube, embedded above. Search online for other streams here.

Remember those thin plastic bags that used to be available, free, at the checkout? This is the starting point for Ramin Bahrani’s short film. What lives do these bags lead after the shopping is emptied from them at home? How long do they live? Where do they end their lives? Do their lives ever end? And what if one of them could tell that story for itself (in a droll Bavarian accent)? What would it say? One may think it’s exciting to have finally been chosen, there at the checkout, to fulfil his destiny. To help a shopper carry their shopping home. The shopper-bag relationship is short-lived, but beautiful. But what if that shopper later uses you to pick up her dog’s poo? And put you in a bin? How would you feel about her then, as your life continued, further and further away from hers? You’re not the slightest bit biodegradable. Your life is going to last for ever, starting in a landfill dump. What’s it like to be there with millions of bits of other trash? Imagine being caught in the wind, blown through the countryside, travelling hundreds of miles, over maybe thousands of years, ending up in the sea, with the fish, possibly causing them all kinds of problems. Who and what might you have seen and met on your journey? What would you ponder about your life now its purpose is so far in the past? This film has a silly and unbelievable plot, but its also wonderfully moving, hilarious, thought-provoking. Viewers are surprised to find themselves empathising with an object. Caring about its fate. How its life could have been different. Maybe this is the best way to change people’s minds about the mountains of waste created by capitalism and its commodity culture. Maybe it’s the perfect film to illustrate vital materialism, assemblage theory, affect and/or dark ecology. Even if Bahrani didn’t set out to do so. Maybe you have to watch it to write an essay. Maybe it’s just too long or just plain stuuuuupid. Like a childish spinoff from a well-known movie franchise like Toy Story. Ugh. Watch and read for yourself! This page is a wild ‘follow the thing’ ride into debates about environmental justice and reponsibility.

Page reference: Molly Healy, Josephine Thompson, Daisy Aylott, Lily Andrews, Kate Ward, Charlotte Rooker, James Swain, Edward Denton & Ethan Langfield (2025) Plastic Bag. followthethings.com/plastic-bag.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 76 minutes.

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