Richmond.com
The Next Michael Morre?
Mike Ward
Richmond.comThursday, October 06, 2005
Micha Peled's "China Blue" takes a stealthy look at Chinese sweatshops and mixes in a little love
A documentary film about Chinese sweatshops conjures up many images and motifs: wasted youth, depression and harrowing danger to name a few. But love?
That's the theme that filmmaker Micha Peled has woven through "China Blue," a film that recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and will make its U.S. debut Friday night in Ashland.
"At first blush, it looked like the whole the film was going to have miserable people hunched over sewing machines and who wants to look at that?" the San Francisco-based filmmaker said to Richmond.com in a recent phone interview.
Sure, the movie has disturbing shots of exhausted workers keeping their drooping eyelids open with clothespins, but Peled decided to spotlight passionate stories within the despair: "Let's cast against what's predictable; let's find a good love story…And what's a good love story? One with obstacles," he told his production crew before shooting.
Peled's cinematic crusade against big business' retail manifest destiny began as a journey from the center of the universe. That is, if you believe Ashland's self-touted slogan. It was there that he filmed "Store Wars" in 2001, a documentary detailing a struggle between the town's small businesses and corporate monolith Wal-Mart.
Peled chose to shoot "China Blue" to demonstrate how Wal-Mart gets the cheap goods that allows it to muscle out mom and pop shops. He tapped a Chinese blue jean factory as the first domino in the sequence.
"That's the beginning of this chain that ends up with a third-generation grocery store in downtown Ashland, Va., going out of business," Peled said. "That's the end of the story. The beginning of the story is these teenage girls in China that are pretty much forced into slave labor."
Of course, filming in the totalitarian state of China isn't the same as infiltrating the tiny town of Ashland. That's why Peled and his crew took their chances with a clandestine production.
You see, in China, foreign filmmakers are forced to obtain a permit and if approved, they must be accompanied by an official from the Propaganda Department. Peled knew he wouldn't be able to make the sort of intimate and honest movie he envisioned while being babysat by the Chinese Communist Party and its 63 million members.
So his crew did the next most logical thing – they snuck in a DV camera piecemeal in shopping bags from across the Hong Kong border. "We decided to just fly under the radar screen," Peled said. "One shopping bag had a view finder, another had a lens." And so on.
From there, Peled had to find intriguing subjects, a factory owner vain and stupid enough to allow foreign filmmakers access…and a little luck.
He found one of his stars in Orchid, a Chinese teenager whose parents disapproved of her relationship with a suitor from a poorer family. He found his factory owner in Guo Xi Lam, a former police chief who owned a jeans factory. As for his luck, it's a bit more complicated.
Peled and his crew battled constant police threats and harassment while filming and had footage confiscated. They even had to put it on hiatus because of SARS scares. All this in a country where you can be jailed and forgotten for simply reading the wrong book.
"Of course it's scary, and you're in a country where you look different from everybody else. I don't speak the language," Peled admitted.
Peled spent three years making "China Blue" and is following the world premiere in Toronto with the U.S. debut this Friday night at the Ashland Theatre. Then it's on to Vancouver, Amsterdam – and hopefully – Sundance.
While the filmmaker doesn't expect to break up the corrupt symbiosis of Western companies and Eastern labor, he does hope to raise awareness and earnestly hopes that one day blue jeans will be an equivalent of organic produce or dolphin-free tuna.
Peled said: "I'm convinced that the people who see this film will come out of it saying, 'You know what, I don't want to feel guilty just for a couple of bucks discount on my clothes to know that on the other side of the world people are going through what these girls in the movie are going through.'"
He believes that even if a small percentage of American consumers echo this sentiment, it will be enough to bring change. "That's enough of a niche in the market that some manufacturer of clothes will exploit that," Peled said.
"China Blue" will premiere Friday night at 7 p.m. at the Ashland Theatre, located in Ashland at 203 England St. Tickets are $10 or $5 with a valid student ID. Proceeds will benefit the Ashland Main Street Plaza Project. The screening is sponsored by Randolph-Macon College, the Town of Ashland and the Ashland-Hanover Citizens for Responsible Growth, and is being show in conjunction with the China-America Festival of Film and Culture hosted by VCU and the University of Richmond.