"Heartbreaking, truly unforgettable" Gerald Peary, The Boston Phoenix

Director: Micha X. Peled
Length/Year: 88 min./2005

Awards and festivals (37 film festivals in 24 countries so far):
• Toronto International Film Festival - Official Selection
• IDFA (Amsterdam) - Winner: DOEN/Amnesty International Human Rights award
• IDFA (Amsterdam) – nominated for Joris Ivens award
• International Independent Film Festival of Mar del Plata (Agentina) Best Documentary
• Vancouver film festival - Honorable Mention
• Vermont International Film Festival (U.S.) - Honorable Mention
• Hawaii International Film Festival –nominated for Best Documentary
• Human Rights Film Festival in Seoul, South Korea - opening night film
• Hong Kong International Film Festival
• Thessaloniki (Greece) International Film Festival
• San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival
• Full Frame (U.S.) Documentary Film Festival
• Toronto Sprockets (children/youth) Film Festival
• It’s all True International Documentary Film Festival, São Paolo, Brazil
• Bermuda International Film Festival
• Zagrebdox (Croatia) International Documentary Film Festival
• One World (Prague) International Film Festival
• Calgary Imagin Asian Film Festival
• Ecuador International Documentary Film Festival
• Warsaw Planete Doc Review, Poland
• Crakow (Poland) International Film Festival
• Jerusalem International Film Festival
• New Zealand Film Festival
• Dallas Video Festival
• Films from the South (Oslo)
• Discovery - Scotland's International Film Festival for Children
• Mill Valley Film Festival (U.S.)
• Filmfest Hamburg
• 3-Continental Film festival (South Africa)
• Cork (Ireland) International Film Festival
• Nazareth International Film Festival (Israel)
• Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival
• DocsLisboa (Portugal)
• Tempo (Stockholm) documentary Film Festival
• CPH:dox (Copenhagen documentary film festival)
• Margaret Mead Film Festival (U.S.)
• Beirut Docudays (Lebanon)
• London Children’s Film Festival
• Kathmandu (Nepal) Int’l Mountain Film Festival

MORE ABOUT the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition
Uniting the power and the passion of two traditions, the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition supports campaigns addressing corporate accountability, living wages, and recognition of the inalienable worth of all human beings.

Across New York State and the country a growing movement is bringing workers and their supporters in unions, religious institutions and youth groups together in efforts to challenge corporate control and to move toward greater economic justice. Specifically, workers, trade unionists, people of faith and young people are uniting to fight sweatshop conditions at home and abroad and to end child labor. They also are actively leading campaigns that call upon municipalities to require that those doing business with government pay living wages.

Sweatfree Campaign

As part of the international effort to end child labor and sweatshops, the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition's Sweatfree Campaign supports efforts to direct the purchasing power of schools and governments towards responsible manufacturers of all kinds of uniforms, sports equipment, logo-bearing items and other apparel.

MORE ABOUT mIcroRevolt
microRevolt developed knitPro, a program that translates digital images into knit, needlepoint, x-stitch and crochet patterns. microRevolt uses knitPro to make "logoknits" - knitted garments with the logos of sweatshop offenders.

knitPro
knitPro is a web application that translates digital images into knit, crochet, needlepoint and cross-stitch patterns. Just upload jpeg, gif or png images of whatever you wish -- portraits, landscapes, logos... and it will generate the image pattern on a grid sizable for any fiber project.

contact
microRevolt
PO Box 1659
Troy, NY 12181
inquiry .AT. microrevolt .DOT. org


More about CHINA BLUE:
www.teddybearfilms.com/chinablue

CHINESE RISK THEIR LIBERTY
Independent organizing of workers, by workers, is illegal in China, in violation of international treaties and covenants that China has signed. To find out what is going on for China’s workers beyond the gates of the factory where we filmed, we got in touch with labor organizers. The people we contacted must keep their activities completely underground, through a loose and clandestine network around the country. If caught, they face either a prison term or a labor re-education camp, where the authorities send people without trial or any due process of law. Reaching our contact required a complicated clock-and-dagger operation. We could not use hotel or pay phones and had to replace our mobile phone card and number shortly afterwards. The man we met was not a line worker, but an engineer with access to management memos in his factory. He provided us with a memo that instructed dept. managers to train their workers in the “correct” answers to questions during the upcoming inspection from Wal-Mart, the main customer of the factory. The management knew in advance not only the date of the inspection, but also the method: the inspectors will pick a few workers at random for an interview. The workers were told how to respond to questions about labor conditions under threat that if they tell the truth the factory will lose its contract and they – their job. The man who provided us with the information agreed to risk speaking on camera because he felt strongly that the world should know how China‘s workers are exploited with the complicity of multinational retail corporations. An interview with this labor activist, whose identity is masked, appears in the film.

GETTING INSIDE
“Like some of Micha X. Peled's previous films (Store Wars, Inside God's Bunker), China Blue is primarily a deep-access film” (The Vancouver Sun). It is the first documentary to penetrate so completely the inside workings of a sweatshop factory, capturing scenes not only on the factory floor and in worker dorms, but also at management meetings and during tense negotiations with Western buyers. The main challenge for us was to get a Chinese factory owner to allow us to film. Naturally, most factories declined to have an unsupervised camera crew prowl their premises at all hours as Peled requested. After knocking on many doors our luck finally changed when we met Guo Xi Lam, the owner of a jeans factory in Shaxi. The town's former police chief turned-businessman, Mr. Lam was proud of his newly built factory. He was flattered to be considered for an American film, which he believed was about the first generation of China's entrepreneurs. Mr. Lam instructed everyone in the factory to co-operate with us at all hours. To select a cast for the film among the hundreds of workers at the factory, Song Chen moved into the compound and lived with the workers. As in all export factories, the workers sleep in dormitories located inside the factory's compound. Chen was given a bunk in a girls dorm room where she was able to form close bonds with a number of workers. We cast the film based on the profiles Chen e-mailed back to Peled. Production, however, took much longer than anticipated - -interruptions ranged from SARS to police intervention and confiscation of footage. To ensure Mr. Lam's continued co-operation we cut for him, out of the documentary footage, a sales promo DVD featuring happy workers who were proud to work around the clock to meet all deadlines.

WE RISK OUR EQUIPMENT

China maintains a tight control over all foreign media. Filmmakers from abroad are required to obtain permits to film. If permission is granted, officials from the Propaganda Department accompany the production unit from the moment they arrive and are present throughout the filming. For obvious reasons, we chose not to apply for such a restrictive permit. Instead, we smuggled our DV camera into China by disassembling it and stashing the various parts into separate shopping bags. The bags were then carried across the Hong Kong-China border by a woman who simply blended in with the usual flow of daytime shoppers. As well, we openly carried a mini-DV camera as many tourists do. Getting the equipment into the country, however, was only the first challenge. When we left the safe confines of the factory --where most of the filming took place -- to follow our characters back to their home villages, things got difficult. In the countryside of Sichuan province, even our small crew stood out. The first police intervention occurred while we were filming... a love story. On the occasion of her 20th birthday, Orchid, a zipper installer at the factory, returned home after a 2-year absence to introduce her boyfriend to her family. The day before the boyfriend's arrival the police caught up with us. They threatened to have the cameraman fired from his regular job at a local TV station, and ordered us to leave the area at once. The crucial moment in Orchid's love story - -which we had followed for six months - -was about to be missed. Undaunted, we went only as far as Louzo, the nearest city. There we hired a driver whose truck had tinted windows and returned to Orchid's house early the next morning. We took a dirt road as far as it allowed, then lugged the equipment up the hill to her house, located on a remote hill outside the village. The scene of Orchid's birthday party is one of the liveliest in the film. On yet another occasion, we were filming a factory strike. The police stopped us even though we did not trespass into the factory grounds. Thanks to our production coordinator, a Hong Kong based CNN stringer who intervened on our behalf, we escaped arrest. The most trying event, however, took place the following year. We arranged to film our protagonist at her home village, and again hired a local cameraman. This time director Micha Peled - -the only Western-looking person in the crew -- remained in a town an hour away. Still the police intervened, arresting not only the cameraman, but Associate Producer Song Chen as well. When the police learned that Chen was a Taiwan-born U.S. citizen and not Chinese, they subjected her and the cameraman to an all-night interrogation. It took frantic calls to various contacts before the police finally let them go, but the tapes were confiscated. Subsequent attempts by the U.S. Consul to have the tapes released proved futile.