China Blue

USCI presents a screening of the award winning documentary, China Blue, followed by a Q&A session with director Micha X. Peled.

They live crowded together in cement factory dormitories where water has to be carried upstairs in buckets. Their meals and rent are deducted from their wages, which amount to less than a dollar a day. Most of the jeans they make in the factory are purchased by retailers in the U.S. and other countries. CHINA BLUE takes viewers inside a blue jeans factory in southern China, where teenage workers struggle to survive harsh working conditions. Providing perspectives from both the top and bottom levels of the factory’s hierarchy, the film looks at complex issues of globalization from the human level.

Seventeen-year-old Jasmine left her home village for a factory job in the city. There, like an estimated 130 million migrant workers on the move in China, most of them young women, she finds factory employment assembling denim clothing for export to overseas companies. She shares a room with 12 other girls and labors every day from 8 a.m. until 2 a.m., seven

Jasmine, a 17 year old factory worker

days a week, removing lint and snipping the loose threads from the seams of denim jeans. Jasmine’s initial excitement to be able to help her family with her wages quickly dissipates as she is overwhelmed by the long work hours and the delays in pay. The strong friendships she forms with her co-workers and memories of home are her only solace. The "new era” of economic progress in China has also created a new generation of entrepreneurs like Mr. Lam, a former police chief who is now the owner of the factory where Jasmine works. To get a new order from a promising British buyer, Lam agrees to extremely low prices and a very tight delivery schedule. For the deal to work, he cuts his workers' pay and requires them to work around the clock.

CHINA BLUE argues that the global economic system leaves factory owners with few choices. It also explores in detail what that means for the workers. Anxious to avoid getting fined for falling asleep on the job, Jasmine and her friend Li Ping sneak out of the factory to buy energy tea, but they get caught and are fined. Other workers resort to clipping clothespins on their eyelids to keep their eyes open. When the workers’ endurance reaches a breaking point, their only recourse may be a strike, which the filmmaker says is illegal.

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•  “A heartbreaking and meticulous documentary about life inside a blue-jeans factory in China… the film develops a natural dramatic structure that's profoundly affecting. Mr. Peled doesn't just record the girls' indignities, he listens to their dreams.”
                                                                                                           THE NEW YORK TIMES

•  Must Watch of the Week
                                                                                                    ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

•  “The most heartbreaking, moving film in theaters right now is not "Babel," "Letters From Iwo Jima" or "Little Children."  It is China Blue… This is an unforgettable film. “
                                                                                      THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

About Micha Peled, the director

A native of Israel, Micha Peled is one of the few ever to emigrate to the U.S. by hitchhiking.  Micha has directed and produced documentaries for broadcasters in the US, Britain, France and Germany.  He made his first film in 1992, when his mother sent him the manuscript of her life story, which became Will My Mother Go Back to Berlin, produced for WDR TV in Germany.  After Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin wrote “it’s a damn good movie, Micha quit his job to become a fulltime filmmaker. He has never looked back.  Since then films have aired on 33 television channels,  were released on DVDs in eight languages (officially), and screened in over 100 film festivals on every continent.
 
For the past ten years, Micha has been working on his globalization trilogy. It began in the U.S. with Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town, about a small town fighting to keep out Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world.  It was followed by China Blue, the story of a teenage Chinese girl who leaves her village to get a job in an export jeans factory. Premiered at the Toronto Int’l Film Festival, the film was nominated at IDFA 2005 for the Juris Ivens Prize and won the Amnesty International Human Rights award.  Among its 12 awards is also the Audience Award for the PBS series Independent Lens. Micha is currently filming in India the final film in the globalization trilogy. His favorite press review quote about his work remains: “I couldn’t restrain frequent outbursts of “Oh my God!”

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