As part of this year’s Material Liberation: A People’s Fashion show, we are screening Bangladeshi feminist filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain’s award-winning feature film, Made in Bangladesh. This film tells the story of Shimu, a young garment worker who struggles to establish a trade union at her workplace. It talks about the importance of the right to organize, an assessment of legal reforms in the past ten years, the public and private patriarchies that workers must navigate, and the possibilities for transnational and communal solidarity under conditions of late neoliberal capitalism.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the most horrific industrial ‘disaster’ (some would say massacre) in the history of the global garment industry — the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Savar, Bangladesh. The figures are numbing – at least 1,134 dead, 2,500 missing and untold others injured and maimed. Labor organizers and others attribute this exceptionally high death toll to, among other things, the absence of a meaningful union, or a collective voice to represent workers’ interests. On that fateful morning, threatened with loss of wages or dismissal, individual workers were in no position to refuse managerial instructions to enter a visibly fissured building.
This is a free educational program, however, in order to maintain a safe capacity level, we ask that you get a $6 solidarity ticket to reserve your participation and to sustain our educational programming.
2020 | Bangladesh | Rubaiyat Hossain | 1h 35m
