Science Fiction From Below

by Dollars and Sense

On Saturday I got to see a terrific new movie, Sleep Dealer, written and directed by Alex Rivera. It's lefty science fiction, and deals with immigration, global sweatshops, militarism, and the corporatization/privatization of water resources, among other topics. The degree to which it is only barely fiction is a little scary. I recommend it highly.

Mark Engler (author of this article for us, among others), has just posted an interview with Alex Rivera over at Foreign Policy in Focus. He's also posted a clip from the movie on his website.

Here is part of the interview:

Science Fiction From Below

Alex Rivera, director of the new film Sleep Dealer, imagines the future of the Global South

By Mark Engler

Tapping into a long tradition of politicized science fiction, the young, New-York-based filmmaker Alex Rivera has brought to theaters a movie that reflects in news ways on the disquieting realities of the global economy. Sleep Dealer, his first feature film, has opened in New York and Los Angeles, and will show in 25 cities throughout the country this spring.

Set largely on the U.S.-Mexico border, Sleep Dealer depicts a world in which borders are closed but high-tech factories allow migrant workers to plug their bodies into the network to provide virtual labor to the North. The drama that unfolds in this dystopian setting delves deeps into issues of immigration, labor, water rights, and the nature of sustainable development.

Rivera's film drew attention by winning two awards at Sundance--the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best film focusing on science and technology. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote of the movie, "Adventurous, ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, Sleep Dealer... combines visually arresting science fiction done on a budget with a strong sense of social commentary in a way that few films attempt, let alone achieve."

Rivera spoke with Foreign Policy In Focus senior analyst Mark Engler by phone from Los Angeles, where the director was attending the local premier of his movie.

M.E.: How do you describe your film?

A.R.: Sleep Dealer is a science fiction thriller that takes a look at the future from a perspective that we've never seen before in science fiction. We've seen the future of Los Angeles, in Blade Runner. We've seen the future of Washington, D.C., in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. We've seen London and Chicago. But we've never seen the places where the great majority of humanity actually lives. Those are in the global South. We've never seen Mexico; we've never seen Brazil; we've never seen India. We've never seen that future on film before.

M.E.: Your main character, Memo Cruz, is from rural Mexico, from Oaxaca. In many ways, the village that we see on film is very similar to many poor, remote communities today. It doesn't necessarily look like how we think about the future at all. What was your conception of how economic globalization would affect communities like these?

A.R.: One of the things that fascinates me about the genre is that, explicitly or not, science fiction is always partly about development theory. So when Spielberg shows us Washington, DC with 15-lane traffic flowing all around the city, he's putting forward a certain vision of development.

Sleep Dealer starts in Oaxaca, and to think about the future of Oaxaca, you have to think about how so-called "development" has been happening there and where might it go. And it's not superhighways and skyscrapers. That would be ridiculous. So, in the vision I put forward, most of the landscape remains the same. The buildings look older. Most of the streets still aren't paved. And yet there are these tendrils of technology that have infiltrated the environment. So instead of an old-fashioned TV, there is a high-definition TV. Instead of a calling booth like they have today in Mexican villages, where people call their relatives who are far away, in this future there is a video-calling booth. There's the presence of a North American corporation that has privatized the water and that uses technology to control the water supply. There are remote cameras with guns mounted on them and drones that do surveillance over the area.

The vision of Oaxaca in the future and of the South in the future is a kind of collage, where there are still elements that look ancient, there is still infrastructure that looks older even than it does today, and yet there are little capillaries of high technology that pulse through the environment.

ME: How far into the future did you set the film?

A.R.: I started working on the ideas in Sleep Dealer ten years ago, and at that point I thought I was writing about a future that was forty or fifty years away, or maybe a future that might not ever happen. Over this past decade, though, the world has rapidly caught up with a lot of the fantasy nightmares in the film. That's been an interesting process.

But, you know, a lot of times we use the word "futuristic" to describe things that are kind of explosions of capital, like skyscrapers or futuristic cities. We do not think of a cornfield as futuristic, even though that has as much to do with the future as does the shimmering skyscraper.

M.E.: In what sense?

A.R.: In the sense that we all need to eat. In the sense that the ancient cornfields in Oaxaca are the places that replenish the genetic supply of corn that feeds the world. Those fields are the future of the food supply.

For every futuristic skyscraper, there's a mine someplace where the ore used to build that structure was taken out of the ground. That mine is just as futuristic as the skyscraper. So, I think Sleep Dealer puts forward this vision of the future that connects the dots, a vision that says that the wealth of the North comes from somewhere. It tries to look at development and futurism from this split point of view--to look at the fact that these fantasies of what the future will be in the North must always be creating a second, nightmare reality somewhere in the South. That these things are tied together.

Read the rest of the interview; see the clip.

Labels: Alex Rivera, immigration, Mark Engler, Sleep Dealer, sweatshops, water rights

 

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5/18/2009 08:49:00 AM 0 comments

 

Kristof: Apologist for Sweatshops

by Dollars and Sense

When I saw Nicholas Kristof's column on sweatshops last week (Where Sweatshops Are a Dream), I just rolled my eyes, since this is an argument that he has been making for years now.

I was pleased to see that there were so many letters lambasting him a few days later. The one I liked best pointed out that Cambodia, the country Kristof focuses on in this latest column, doesn't exactly support his case: "Cambodian garment shops are among the best in Asia because of a deal done with the United States in a trade treaty signed in 1999." But Kristof's apologetics undermine the very labor agreements that would bring that about.

D&S columnist John Miller wrote against Kristof on this topic a couple of years ago, in his article Nike to the Rescue?, back when the globe-trotting Kristof was praising sweatshops in Namibia. Here's what John had to say then:

Nicholas Kristof has been beating the pro-sweatshop drum for quite a while. Shortly after the East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Kristof, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and now columnist for the New York Times, reported the story of an Indonesian recycler who, picking through the metal scraps of a garbage dump, dreamed that her son would grow up to be a sweatshop worker. Then, in 2000, Kristof and his wife, Times reporter Sheryl WuDunn, published "Two Cheers for Sweatshops" in the Times Magazine. In 2002, Kristof's column advised G-8 leaders to "start an international campaign to promote imports from sweatshops, perhaps with bold labels depicting an unrecognizable flag and the words 'Proudly Made in a Third World Sweatshop.'"

Now Kristof laments that too few poor, young African men have the opportunity to enter the satanic mill of sweatshop employment. Like his earlier efforts, Kristof's latest pro-sweatshop ditty synthesizes plenty of half-truths.

Part of John's response:

Kristof's argument is no excuse for sweatshop abuse: that conditions are worse elsewhere does nothing to alleviate the suffering of workers in export factories. They are often denied the right to organize, subjected to unsafe working conditions and to verbal, physical, and sexual abuse, forced to work overtime, coerced into pregnancy tests and even abortions, and paid less than a living wage. It remains useful and important to combat these conditions even if alternative jobs are worse yet.

The fact that young men in Namibia find sweatshop jobs appealing testifies to how harsh conditions are for workers in Africa, not the desirability of export factory employment.

The whole article is worth a read, though it's dismaying that we still have to be making these arguments. Someone needs to take away Kristof's passport before he spreads his apologetics to even more corners of the earth.

Labels: apologetics, Nicholas Kristof, sweatshops

 

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1/29/2009 01:47:00 PM 1 comments

 

Stop child labor: buy haute couture!

by Dollars & Sense

Speaking of Boston's Metro as a tool for getting progressive economic views out to a wide audience: magazine editor Amy Gluckman is now the only member of the Dollars & Sense staff who hasn't published a letter to the editors of the Metro. Last fall, magazine editor Chris Sturr chided the Metro for paying more attention to Boston youth activists' clothing than their message when they testified before the Boston City Council about violence, police conduct, and safety in the city. Last February, editor Dan Fireside opined that of course fooling around with an intern is a much more serious offense than shooting your hunting partner and trying to cover it up. And today, business manager Esther Cervantes responded to an interview with Valerie Salembier, publisher of Harper's Bazaar, in which Salembier advised Metro readers that they could stop sweatshops and child labor by eschewing designer knock-offs (and, of course, spending much more to buy the real thing).

In all the years I’ve been aware of the evils of sweatshops and child labor, never would I have guessed that buying haute couture could put an end to it all. My thanks to Harper’s Bazaar publisher Valerie Salembier (and Metro's Jason Notte) for setting me straight.

When Salembier says that real designer garments are better than fakes because the sweatshops that make the fakes employ "the youngest children," I don't ask how young the children who make the real things are: what matters is that they're not the youngest. When the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition tells me that "counterfeiting is a $600 billion per year problem," I don't ask if that $600 billion would otherwise go into executives' pockets or workers' pockets. And when the IAC reminds me that the counterfeit market is "fueled by consumer demand" for the "cachet [of] the real thing," I don't think about the fashion and advertising industries' role in creating and enlarging that demand.

I also try not to think about better ways than buying designer clothes to shop responsibly: like buying fair trade, buying second-hand, and buying less. And donating the money it saves me to real anti-sweatshop campaigns. Because by dressing up their concern for profits in the guise of concern for labor conditions, Salembier and her anticounterfeiting campaign reveal themselves as the worst fakes of all.

Resources

• The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre offers a library of articles on sweatshop labor in high fashion.


• From The Observer, an article on sweatshop and child labor in decorating Indian couture.


• Dollars & Sense on sweatshops: Sweatshops 101 and Nike to the Rescue?


• And for those of you looking to really shop ethically, No Sweat apparel offers a handy and extensive resources page .

Labels: child labor, haute couture, sweatshops

 

Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!).
2/07/2007 11:50:00 AM 1 comments