Make a documentary – followthethings.com

“Letter from Masanjia”
Documentary film starring Sun Yi, directed by Leon Lee, co-written by Sun Yi, Leon Lee & Caylan Ford, in English & Mandarin with English subtitles.
Vimeo trailer and pay per view stream embedded above [may not work in your region]. Check here and here for other streaming options, and here to purchase and here to borrow a DVD or Blu-ray copy [may not work in your region].

One of the earliest examples of trade justice activism that we researched and added to our store was a letter that went viral in 2012 [it’s here]. Oregon, USA shopper Julie Keith had found a one page handwritten note in a box of Kmart Halloween decorations. It was a ‘message in a bottle’ from a prison labour camp in China. It asked her to forward it to the World Human Rights organisation, because these decorations had been made by political prisoners who were being tortured and forced to make these things. The letter was anonymous. She posted a photo of it on facebook asking for help. Soon, the story of the letter was featured in her local newspaper, and was picked up by international news outlets like CNN and the New York Times. They were eager to expose the scandal and to find the person who had written it. The New York Times found him: they called him ‘Mr Zhang’ who was no longer in jail. But the story then reached China via an online post – published and quickly deleted – that caused outrage on Chinese social media. Writing that letter had had the most amazing impact. Doing what its author had asked had had the most amazing impact. China’s ‘Re-education Through Labour’ programme was abolished, and 160,000 political prisoners were released from its prison labour camps. But the New York Times journalist wasn’t the only person who found the author. A Chinese filmmaker living in Canada called Leon Lee had also tracked him down. The author had watched his banned-in-China documentary about the human organ trade in China via a VPN connection. For that film, Leon Lee had interviewed former inmates of the notorious Masanjia labour camp where the author had been incarcerated. He’d used his contacts from making that film to find him. Lee talked to him via an encrypted Skype call. They decided to make a film about the letter, the labour camps, and political repression in China. But Lee was barred from China. If he’d travelled there, he’d have ended up in jail, or worse. So he trained the letter’s author – now happy to use his name Sun Yi – in covert filmmaking techniques, and how to smuggle encrypted hard drives to Canada to get the footage to Lee to make the film. The film that Lee made – Letter from Masanjia – had two parts: one looked back on the story of Sun Yi’s incarceration, decoration-making, letter writing and smuggling (illustrated by cartoons Sun Yi drew himself), and the other documented his ongoing persecution by the state after release for his past and continued activism (including making this film). When letter from Masanjia came out, it was a sensation. The plot was so unbelievable, so i-have-no-idea-what-will-happen-next, so emotionally complex, that it had to be true. Festival audiences around the world were blown away. It’s a classic ‘follow the thing’ narrative – people in other parts of the world make the things that Western consumers buy in horrible conditions. Here, however, the worker is in the narrative’s driving seat, first writing and smuggling the letter, and then filming (and drawing) the story that’s edited for release. The risks he has taken, and the calm, determined demeanour he shows in the process, amaze the film’s audiences. As does the meeting that takes place between him and Julie Keith in Jakarta, which ends the film. As does Sun Yi’s death in suspicious circumstances at the end of the filming. As well as being a hugely emotional producer-meets-consumer story, and a hugely brave and tragic success story of trade justice activism, Letter to Masanjia message is both anti-capitalist and anti-communist. There’s something in it for everyone. Any exposé of something ‘Made in China’ can do that. It generated tons of discussion and debate, which we’ve tried to capture below. This Halloween tale is incredibly scary.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2025) Letter from Masanjia. followthethings.com/letter-from-masanjia.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 123 minutes.

Posted on September 16, 2025September 29, 2025 by Ian Cook

Xmas Unwrapped

followthethings.com
Gifts & Seasonal

2014

UNBRANDED

SANTA HAT

CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

LIE TO TELL THE TRUTH

“Xmas Unwrapped“
A short film edited by Toby Smith and Unknown Fields Division with Tim Maughan.
Posted in YouTube, embedded above in full.

This short ‘Jingle Bells’ Chinese Christmas factory film comes from a larger initiative to rethink architecture. According to Unknown Fields Division co-founder Liam Young, ‘an architect’s skills are completely wasted on making buildings’. They should be turning their attention to the outsides that are inside them: i.e. the hidden geographies of infrastructure, logistics, commodities and connected landscapes. For ‘follow the thingers’ familiar with Geographer Doreen Massey’s concept of a ‘global sense of place’ [see this example], this extroverted sense of place may seem familiar. But there’s so much to learn from Unknown Fields’ architectural experiments. First, from the thoroughly collaborative and interdisciplinary studio practice of Unknown Fields Division. Second, from the long-running postgraduate course at the Architectural Association in London where Liam Young has taken students on infrastructural ‘expeditions’ for many years. Third, from the writers, filmmakers, data-visualisers and programmers who have accompanied these expeditions and produced its highly-professional and publicly eye-catching work. Xmas Unwrapped is one such output – a ‘Christmas card’ – from a 2014-15 expedition called A World Adrift. We’ve asked our ‘Geographies of material culture’ students to watch it before writing their coursework over the Christmas break. It doesn’t have a explicit message, but it’s catchy and thought-provoking. There’s observational footage of people working in a basic factory space in China making Christmas decorations and Santa hats by hand. Other people box these up, load them into a container, and the film finishes with a view from bridge of a container ship sailing out to sea, taking them to their consumer destinations. If you watch it with the sound down and the film footage is undramatic. People just work. Their tasks are repetitive. Their heads are down. They say nothing. The footage does not aim – it seems – to evoke any emotion in its audience. But turn up the volume and it’s accompanied by a choir of children singing ‘Jingle Bells’ in Cantonese. And it’s this combination of film footage and music that provokes a reaction. It’s catchy. This film is a gentle form of trade justice activism. You could call it an appetiser. It’s trying to ‘pop the bubble’ of Western consumption by ‘joining the dots’ to Chinese factory production. It does not explicitly address trade injustice, exploitation, labour rights or any consumer or producer activism relating to this. The factory and logistics workers it features don’t have a voice in their representation. Unknown Fields Division isn’t making this work because they want audiences to do anything. Just to know and to reflect on the fact that its audience member’s things are made by people elsewhere in the world. This film can be used as a brief and gently provocative spark for discussions of trade (in)justice in any classroom [like another example on our site, Handprint] but also – especially – around a Christmas dinner table. Because Unknown Field Division‘s expeditions have so many people on them, this film is the tip of an iceberg. The most noticeable impacts it has are not on its audiences [as far we can see] but on the expedition’s students and collaborators. They produce other work that brings attention to this Christmas story, and to the wider project on architecture’s dependence on supply chain logistics. Follow the arguments below.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2025) Xmas Unwrapped. followthethings.com/xmas-unwrapped.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 39 minutes.

Posted on November 4, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Big Boys Gone Bananas!*

followthethings.com
Grocery

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

CULTIVATE RELATIONSHIPS

INVOLVE CONSUMERS

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

INCLUDE A BOYCOTT

INCLUDE EMOTION

ENCOURAGE EMPATHY

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

“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.