A Feast of Documentaries

(6 of 8)

The movie thinks a little too highly of Simmons star quality; it cant pull itself away from his many conferences with politicos. Its most telling story thread is the tale of a convict-victim. Darryl Best says that he signed for a FedEx package, though it wasnt addressed to him and he didnt know what was inside. The package contained drugs, the cops were there, and he got 15 years to life. Eventually he is encouraged to petition Pataki for clemency. See the film to find out if justice or mercy was served. And stay till the end,to see a gallery of a few of the vast numbers still in lockdown. Example: "Matthew Jones: still serving 60 years for delivery of a narcotic." Liberals, can you live with this? Conservatives, look for the money. New York State alone spends a half-billion dollars a year to house 15,500 drug offenders, most of whom had no history of violence. Is this how you want you tax dollars spent?

Our tax dollars also support the industries that have outsourced American jobs. In Tijuana, which bills itself as "World Capital of the Television," companies like Sony, Sanyo and Panasonic opened factories whose employees assemble TV-set parts. In 1999, 4,000 factories employed a million workers. From all over Mexico and countries farther south, people (mostly women) streamed into the city for the relatively high wages: $68 for a six-day week. The owner of one building leased to a manufacturer said that globalization was turning Mexico into "a nation of plantations." These are the Grapes of NAFTA.

Maquilapolis, by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, is in the spirit of recent documentaries on the plight of the female workers who staff garment factories in China. This film focuses on Carmen Duran, a Mexican employee of Sanyo. When, after 6-1/2 years in Tijuana, the company decamped for Indonesia, Duran and a few of her coworkers sued to win the severance pay the said was mandated by Mexican law. Another laborer, Lourdes Lujon, agitated against Metales y Derivados when that company skipped town and left a festering dump that gave those who lived nearby skin diseases and put them at risk for leukemia.

The movie, mostly a straightforward synopsis of the workers grievances, argues not for special privileges but for a flicker of justice. It has one gust of cinematic artistry: scenes of the women, on a desolate mesa, performing hand-ballets of their factory tasks. It is reminiscent of Robert Flahertys great document of Depression-era farm workers, The Land (1941), where we watch a sleeping boy whose hands move automatically and involuntarily. "Hes shucking peas," his mother explains.

Do the workers win their cases? I wont say. But the conflicts of work and poverty, hope and exploitation, dignity and despair play out around the world, as people whose lives rarely touch ours toil to make our computers and sneakers.

A decade ago, a documentary similar to Maquilapolis could have been made in any Rust Belt city about the workers whose jobs literally went south, to be filled at much lower wages by people like Carmen and Lourdes. A decade from now, another might be made in Indonesia, if businesses can find poorer countries and hungrier workers.