Tell the truth – Page 2 – followthethings.com

“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 first of two films on this topic. The second is “Big Boys Gone Bananas!*”. See our page in this here.

Swedish Filmmaker Fredrik Gertten tracks a ‘class action’ legal case in which lawyers working on behalf of a group of Nicaraguan banana workers sue the American fruit multinational Dole in a Califiornia court for exposing them to a banned pesticide known to cause impotency in men. Gertten follows a flamboyant Cuban-heritage, Los-Angeles based lawyer called Juan ‘Accidentes’ Domingiuez as he and his team gather evidence from affected workers and present it in court. Grainy court-TV footage is cut into the film, and the scenes are remarkable. Dominguez’ attourney Dwane Miller encourages Alberto Rosales and other plaintiffs to explain how their lives were ruined by these chemicals robbing them of their fertility. And when Dole CEO David Delorenzo is in the dock, Miller gets him to admit that Dole used these banned pesticides knowing the risk. Dole attorney Rick McKnight cross examines the plaintiffs, aiming to show they are drunks and liars. When the verdict comes in, Dole is largely found guilty and ordered to pay compensation to the plaintiffs. Dominguez conveys the good news to the farming communities, phoning in to a radio show, and visiting to talk to a packed hall of workers. He’s a hero. But this is a test-case. If it’s successful, thousands of other victims would be able to claim compensation from Dole too. So, as the film is being readied for its premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Dole launches a sophisticated smear campaign against Dominguez (accusing him of fraud – a charge later discmissed) and the film (which they claim is based on fraudulent content). Suspiciously, damning reviews appear in newspapers and film trade publications before teh film has its premiere (i.e. before anyone had seen it). Dole forces it to be taken out of competition and the festival organiser reads a disclaimer to the audience before its only screening. Fredrik Gertten, the director, doesn’t know it at the time but this is be the first of two films he will make on this topic. The second will be about Dole’s attempts to silence the first. He films everything as the chaos unfolds. [See our page on the sequel – ‘Big Boys Gone Bananas!*’ – here] But this scandal means Bananas!* picks up priceless free publicity, and diverse allies, worldwide. When it’s finally distributed, it’s marketed as ‘the film Dole doesn’t want you to see.’ Maybe if Dole had left it alone, Bananas!* wouldn’t have become a ‘must see’ example of trade justice fillmmaking, then and now. If their corporate public relations team had decided to just keep quiet, they wouldn’t have amplified Dole’s corporate misbehaviour that Bananas!* tracked so diligently. Amplifying a critique by trying to silence it is called the ‘Streisand Effect’, by the way, and this isn’t the only example on our site. So much happened in and around this film that this is an epic followthethings.com page. There are so many comments to read. But does the scandal about the silencing of the film distract from the scandal of Dole’s banned pesticide use, and its effects on so many thousands of banana workers in Nicaragua? As you will see, the answer is yes and no.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2020) Bananas!*. followthethings.com/bananas.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 100 minutes.

Posted on September 20, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

The Oil Road: Journeys From The Caspian Sea To The City Of London

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Home & Auto

2012

BRITISH PETROLEUM

CRUDE OIL

SOURCED IN AZERBAIJAN

USED IN EUROPE

PUBLICATION

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

TELL THE TRUTH

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

REACH NEW AUDIENCES

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

TARGET THE RIGHT BRAND

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

SHOW THE VIOLENCE

KNOW YOUR HISTORY

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

“The Oil Road: Journeys From The Caspian Sea To The City Of London”
A non-fiction travelogue by James Marriott & Mika Minio-Paluello, published by Verso.
Google Books preview embedded above.

‘Oil corporation resisters’ James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello travel the length of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline which carries crude oil from Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea oilfields to refineries in Europe and, from there, into the region’s cars, buses & other oil-burning machines. They find this oil’s human stories, secret places and complex connections, and companies and governments that don’t want them to be revealed. They investigate how British Petroleum – which operates and co-owns it – wields incredible power over the governments of the countries the pipeline passes through that it is able to sweep aside everyone and everything in its path. The Oil Road paints a picture of the West’s ‘energy imperialism’ and insatiable addiction to oil. But this is far from a dry academic or NGO report of ‘energy security’ and oil geopolitics. Rather, it’s a vivid piece of industrial / infrastructural travel writing. A page-turning detective thriller that’s accessible to readers who don’t identify as oil-geeks. The authors use a familiar road trip format for political advocacy, to ‘show the filthy entrails of the global economy close up’, as one commenter puts it. Some commenters rage at BP, and/or say the authors are obviously a biased against BP, and/or bemoan the lack of alternatives and/or express greater worries about the ‘carbon web’ that the book vividly – but only partly – reveals. This is thing-following in multiple ways. It follows oil along a pipeline. It follows the pipeline itself. And it follows the money generated by the oil flowing along the pipeline.

Page reference: Molly Mansfield, Louise Ford, Olivia Rogers, Millie Smith, Bryony Board & Charlotte Watts (2013) The Oil Road. followthethings.com/the-oil-road.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 33 minutes.

Posted on August 28, 2024January 28, 2025 by Ian Cook

Machines

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Fashion

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

MAKE IT BEAUTIFUL

MAKE IT INCOMPLETE

“Machines“
A documentary film directed by Rahul Jain with cinematography by Rodrigo Trejo Villanueva for Jann Pictures, Pallas Film & IV Films.
Trailer embedded above. Available on demand on Vimeo here and Dogwoof here. Available on Box of Broadcasts here and Kanopy here (with institutional login). Search online for other streaming options here.

Director Rahul Jain revisits the fabric factories of his youth to document machines and people that print patterns on the rolls of fabric bought by clothing manufacturers to make the shirt, dress or pair of tights that you or I might wear. His film is beautiful, atmospheric, metronomic, disturbing. Watching the machines at work, and the people tending them, is mesmerising. The cinematography is wonderful. It seems like a proper ‘fly on the wall’ documentary for a long time. When the workers later start to talk about their lives and work in this place, it’s depressing, hopeless, boring, toxic, abject, unhappy. This is a powerful film that moves audience members viscerally, but Jain doesn’t want them to do anything to help the workers. Towards the end, workers telling Jain that he’s just like a politician. He visits. He hears problems. He leaves. Nothing changes. So what can a film like this do? What’s the point of making it? How do audience members respond? What difference can it make? Is it about this factory and its workers? Or capitalism as a system? Is this trade justice activism? Or an arthouse film? The answer is open…

Page reference: Annily Skye Jeffries (2017) Machines. followthethings.com/machines.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Page also available in Finnish here (coming soon)

Estimated reading time: 62 minutes.

Posted on August 28, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Made In Cambodia

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Fashion

BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER

ENCOURAGE EMPATHY

“Made in Cambodia“
A dissertation by Helen Clare, submitted as part of their BA Geography degree at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Click the preview pages above to read the dissertation.

Undergraduate student Helen Clare looks through her clothes and finds an H&M t-shirt ‘Made in Cambodia’. She’s traveling to Cambodia to do some charity work in her summer vacation. She wants to find and meet one of the garment factory workers who helped to make that T-shirt for her. But, despite her best efforts, she cannot gain access to the factories where she’s convinced it may have been made. So, she does the next best thing. She takes a course that will give her the qualification to work there. What does she learn along the way? Who does she get to meet? And what can she learn from them about the lives her t-shirt connects?

Dissertation reference: Helen Clare (2006) Made in Cambodia. BA Geography Dissertation: University of Birmingham, UK (followthethings.com/madeincambodia.shtml last accessed <insert date here>)

Page reference: Helen Clare (2024) Made in Cambodia. followthethings.com/made-in-cambodia.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 92 minutes.

Posted on August 21, 2024March 11, 2025 by Mark

UDITA (ARISE)

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Fashion

“UDITA (ARISE)“
A documentary film directed by Hannan Majid & Richard York of the Rainbow Collective.
Available in full on YouTube (embedded above).

The women who work in garment factories in the Global South are often seen by factory bosses as docile and nimble fingered and by Global North journalists and activists as victims in need of saving from capitalist exploitation. But what if there was a film about their work, lives and struggles that was told from their perspectives? Watch UDITA (ASRISE)! Filmed in Dhaka, Bangladesh over five years – starting before and ending after the Rana Plaza factory collapse which killed so many women like them (including their friends and relatives) – Hannah Majid & Richard York show garment workers as an organised body of people teaching, learning and fighting for their labour rights through the campaigning and strike action of Bangladesh’s National Garment Workers’ Federation. There’s no Western filmmaker narrating their quest to find out who made their clothes. There’s no voiceover at all. The only voices are those of the women themselves. They are less interested in what ‘guilty’ consumers in the Global North can do to help them, and more interested in what they can do to help each other. So, who would want to see a film like this? Who was it made for? What are audiences supposed to take away from it? One answer is to appreciate how garment workers in the Global South have powerful collective agency. This is a fundamental, but often neglected, principle in trade justice activism. An important move for audiences to make, as the philosopher Iris Marion Young has put it, ‘from guilt to solidarity’.

Page reference: Theo Barker, Joe Collier, Annabel Baker, Lizzie Coppen & Henry Eve (2025) UDITA (ARISE). followthethings.com/udita.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 66 minutes.

Posted on August 19, 2024January 10, 2025 by Ian Cook

The Letter In The Saks 5th Avenue Bag

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Fashion | My shopping bag

“The Letter In The Saks 5th Avenue Bag“
A letter written by Tohnain Emmanuel Thiong in a Chinese prison factory, found in New York in a Saks 5th Avenue shopping bag by Stephanie Wilson and posted online.
Reproduced in full above.

Stephanie Wilson buys a pair of Hunter rain boots at a high end department store – Saks Fifth Avenue – in New York City. Rummaging through the ‘free with purchase’ bag, she is shocked to find a handwritten letter in English that begins ‘HELP! HELP! HELP!’ and a tiny passport photo. It’s from a Cameroonian man who made that bag it in a Chinese prison factory. With the help of an NGO and a journalist, she finds him. This ‘message in a bottle’ definitely wasn’t a hoax (or was it?). But how was he able to write it? How many did he write? What danger was he in by doing this? All of these questions could be answered. It helped that he’d written his Yahoo email address on the back. And that he was no longer in prison, or in China, when they emailed him. Could a short letter like this have a big impact on the sourcing of these bags? What were the chances that someone would find and act on one? Its discovery, the detective work that it sparked, and the issues that it raised, went viral. Which companies want their branded goods to be made in jail by falsely imprisoned, tortured and molested inmates? It’s not just the commodities that a store sells that shoppers should be worried about. It’s the bags, the tills, the escalators… everything that contributes to the shopping experience. Workers’ rights are everywhere. Including in office furniture allegedly made in US prisons. Fact-check!

Page reference: Will Kelleher & Ian Cook (2014) The Letter In The Saks 5th Avenue Bag. followthethings.com/the-letter-in-the-saks-5th-avenue-bag.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 37 minutes.