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2008 Winners - Arts (First place)
Cultural divide and family ties
by Joshua Ginsberg
McGill Daily (McGill University)
Local filmmaker Faisal Lutchmedial explores sweatshop labour in his mother's country in My Cultural Divide
In a low-ceilinged room thick with fumes of leather and glue, rows of men and boys sit shoulder to shoulder, focused on their tasks. They are in the middle of a 20-hour day that will stop only for a short sleep, taken on the floor beside the worktables. The grueling schedule repeats itself seven days a week until the order of Italian-designed shoes is assembled, ready to be shipped to a shopping mall near you.
This is not fiction culled from activist literature, but a haunting scene from a thoughtful documentary by local filmmaker Faisal Lutchmedial. My Cultural Divide explores the prevalent sweatshop conditions in Bangladesh, challenging the conventional notion that consumer boycotts will allow us to shop the problem away. It also breaks with activist tradition by marrying the personal and political, as Lutchmedial accompanies his ailing mother back to her native country and ponders the gap between his Bangladeshi roots and life in Western consumer society.
The film uses interviews with representatives of anti-sweatshop NGOs, sustainable companies, and labour groups to create a solid overview of the sweatshop problem’s complexity, but it is truly notable for its focus on ordinary Bangladeshis. Lutchmedial’s camera takes us into factories, union offices, and onto the streets, allowing workers to tell stories that are often repressed by factory owners and corporations afraid of bad press.
Although he is of Bangladeshi heritage, Lutchmedial was concerned about avoiding the orientalism that the Western eye often brings to the developing world.
“I wanted to appreciate Bangladeshi society for what it was rather than what I thought it should be, and at the same time I had to acknowledge the fact that I am a tourist, just going into this country for the first time. And even though I have brown skin and even though my mother is from the country, I will have a lot of preconceived notions about the place,” he said.
Lutchmedial’s mentality results in a non-judgmental look at a serious problem. There is no finger-wagging here, but an open-minded discussion encompassing the voices of western activists and Bangladeshi workers. The film does not shy away from the disturbing reality, but responds to it with questions instead of hyperbole.
Some of these questions will give pause to those eager to help end exploitation. For instance, should we impose an economic boycott on goods produced using child labour if this will simply force children out of the factories and into the streets?
Lutchmedial knows that there are no easy answers, and doesn’t try to fabricate them. Instead, the film succeeds by bridging the disconnect between its viewers and a far-off place. To privileged first-world eyes, watching a documentary about global poverty can seem like an otherworldly experience. But by weaving together political and family narratives, the story acquires what Lutchmedial calls a “sense of place.” The family story shrinks the space between Dhaka and Montreal, making it easier to think of the Bangladeshis in the film as neighbours rather than specimens.
But producing this effect wasn’t easy.
“Creating the balance for this film was my greatest challenge in the editing room: finding a place where the personal did not take over and the political wasn’t obscured, and at the same time making sure the story is told,” says Lutchmedial.
The doc’s diverse interviewees, ranging from workers demanding better conditions to the colourful and controversial CEO of American Apparel, help sustain interest from the intro to the closing credits. But I had to ask how Lutchmedial felt standing in squalid factories talking to people in clearly desperate situations. How did he retain his composure, and even remember to laugh a little?“You imagine being in a situation like that and you think that it would be awful and that you would be at the edge of tears by seeing things like that,” he says. “But the experience was actually quite a bit different. It was only through reflection that I felt that way; during the time that I was there, I was really filled with a sense of disbelief and almost humour. That was a very honest feeling.”
