Review by Andrew Swafford
Perhaps the most widely known film about union organizing is 1979’s Norma Rae, which we covered on the podcast earlier this year and which chronicles the unionization of a textile factory in small-town North Carolina. In many ways, Made in Bangladesh feels like a spiritual successor to that film – not least of which is the fact that many of the American factories that people were working to unionize in Norma Rae’s day have now imperialized countries like Bangladesh, where not even America’s minimum wage can get in the way of unfettered profit extraction.
Director Rubaiyat Hossain’s film takes an empathetic and methodical look at the act of upsetting this power structure from the ground level; the factory floor is entirely made up of women who are exploited by a small number of male supervisors (making Made in Bangladesh a great case study in the way in which feminist identity politics and Marxist economic theory share a common goal). When a factory fire ends up killing a woman employee but management carries on with business as usual, the protagonist’s sudden jolt of class-consciousness sets into motion the slow, difficult process of organizing with her co-workers.
The film is hardly idealistic about how attainable this is, however, as the women at its center face roadblock after roadblock on their way to attain the slightest bit of dignity – one of the last ones being a darkly hilarious bureaucratic office space stacked to the ceiling with rotting brown files. Hossain’s camera gives images like these a lot of power, and I really admire how well she uses color throughout Made in Bangladesh. Her entire cast of women are always seen adorned with ornate saris of different colors, and she makes a point of consistently putting several women in the frame together to make these colors pop even more, celebrating the products of these women’s labor. She’s great at depicting scenes of togetherness – like the colorful wedding scene that takes place in the second act – and then cutting through it with scenes of gray isolation, giving visual language to the factory’s “divide and conquer” mentality as contrasted with a more joyful and collective one.
I’m also impressed by the performances here, which are fierce and laced with a lot more profanity than one might expect. Overall, Made in Bangladesh is a very solid piece of work – maybe even a stronger movie than Norma Rae?