The documentary Fashion victims tells the stories of textile workers in India, who live in conditions on the edge of human dignity. We discuss it with those who made it, taking great risks imposed by a culture of terror and silence.
We think we know fashion, but in truth we know almost nothing about it. The faces and stories of those behind the clothes we wear every day are as distant as they are unknown to our collective imagination. Lifting the veil on the hidden realities of the Indian textile industry is the new feature documentary Fashion victims, directed by filmmaker Alessandro Brasile alongside Chiara Ka' Hue Cattaneo, and given its world premiere on 28 March at the Oberdan cinema as part of the 29th edition of the Festival Cinema Africano, Asia e America Latina. Screened again on 23 April at the Cinema Mexico in Milan, the showing was one of the highlights of Fashion revolution week, the initiative launched by the Fashion revolution movement (coordinated in Italy by designer Marina Spadafora) to commemorate the disaster at Rana Plaza, the garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, that collapsed in 2013 killing more than a thousand workers, and to raise awareness among consumers and companies of the need to adopt a sustainable fashion model.
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Set in Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India, the documentary reveals the dynamics that govern the recruitment of millions of teenage girls and young women employed in factories for the production of clothing for the fast fashion market, both local and international. The project was self-produced by the directors themselves with the collaboration of several professionals, including the organisation Social Awareness and Voluntary Education (Save), which supported the team in making the documentary in a context as difficult as it is dangerous for anyone who chooses to undertake journalistic or documentary work perceived as unwelcome.
The director himself, Brasile, recounts having repeatedly put his personal safety at great risk. On the first day of filming he was attacked, and once he managed to gain access to one of the factories, he not only failed to obtain permission to film but was logged in an unofficial system. "I was photographed and the fixer said, word for word: 'This is the last thing we needed — now your face is on every phone belonging to the managers of the factories in the area.' From that point on, it would definitely have been better not to be seen around."
At the heart of the story are girls from poor, rural areas who end up in production facilities where they are forced to live in dormitories attached to the factories and to work for three to five years on shifts of up to twenty hours a day, without receiving any monthly wage. The arrangement stipulates that, aside from a meagre sum of money to cover daily needs, the girls must receive a lump-sum payment of between five hundred and eight hundred euros, paid only at the end of the agreed period. In the meantime they frequently fall victim to workplace accidents, non-payment, suicide, sexual violence and even murder.
"The girls are fully aware of the conditions they live with every day," says Brasile. "Not all of them, nor their families, are aware of the possible risks when they choose to work in textile factories. This is their daily reality, but it is of course not the norm they aspire to. All the women interviewed reveal that they have aspirations for ordinary happiness: to study, to put their younger brothers and sisters through school, to provide for their parents, to speak English in order to access a bigger and more distant world. For them, work represents an important opportunity for social and economic emancipation, an opportunity they cannot choose to pass up. They adapt to the circumstances, knowing neither the system as a whole nor the global textile supply chain, and unable to act to radically change either one."
The textile industry in southern India generates enormous profits, and so the system of slavery that dominates these activities is quietly concealed by both the state and by companies. The workers themselves are afraid to talk about what goes on inside the factories; indeed, Brasile encountered no shortage of difficulties in finding girls willing to share their experiences.
"During filming with one of the girls who had agreed to be interviewed, Mercy Angela Mary, immediately after the clapperboard she didn't say a word. It happened a couple of times, with waits of tens of minutes, without us understanding what was going on. She didn't speak until an uncle arrived and gave her permission to tell her story. This took place in a village where even the mere fact of arriving by car, as we did, immediately arouses a curiosity bordering on suspicion. No one has much desire to talk about events that are mostly painful, perhaps out of fear that they will cause more pain, or that they will reveal too much about the mechanisms of social and economic control that made them possible. After about an hour spent in Mercy Angela Mary's home, away from prying eyes, we started to hear motorbikes repeatedly passing close to the house. The message was clear: we had to finish quickly and leave."
Having lived through this intense yet enriching experience, Brasile and Ka' Hue Cattaneo no longer have any doubt in asserting that "this is the time for urgency and action," in the words of the former. "Hearing the stories told in Fashion victims, one abandons the illusion that gradual change within the industry is possible — as proposed by many, but with results that are often insubstantial — and comes to understand that radical change of the entire system is instead necessary."
"This is why we believe that consumer engagement is of vital importance. Consumers, who are also citizens, can exercise their power through their wallets and their votes, through a more conscious lifestyle. Their involvement, however, must not shift the burden of change and responsibility, which falls squarely on the industries that operate according to a model of unbridled exploitation of resources — where those resources include the girls interviewed and millions of other workers around the world."