Cotton100% review – how forced labour paid the price of Uzbekistan’s ‘white gold’ – The Guardian
As a baby rising up in Uzbekistan, film-maker Michael Borodin spent weeks at a time within the fields choosing cotton when he ought to have been in school. The nation is the world’s sixth-largest cotton producer; two million Uzbeks are concerned within the manufacturing of “white gold”. Till not too long ago, the state nonetheless had a monopoly on the business and yearly, medical doctors, academics and different authorities employees – in addition to schoolkids – had been frogmarched to the fields at harvest time.
Final 12 months, a UN company reported that compelled labour for cotton choosing had been lastly abolished in Uzbekistan. This documentary, filmed earlier than that report was revealed, follows two girls concerned within the business. To be trustworthy, the movie is a troublesome promote to anybody exterior Uzbekistan, with not a lot within the in the way in which of element or context to clarify what’s occurring on display.
Nonetheless, its topics are fascinating. Human-rights activist Yelena is in her 60s, a blazing pressure of nature marching in regards to the countryside handing out flyers and gathering proof of poor circumstances. She finds a gaggle of press-ganged miners housed quickly in a school: “Do the bosses sleep on the concrete flooring?” she sarcastically asks a safety guard.
Muhabata, in the meantime, is a cotton farmer wringing her palms on the prospect of filling a quota set by native authorities. An official knocks at her door and calls for that she begins harvesting. Muhabata protests that her crops aren’t ripe but. The identical factor occurred final 12 months; they ordered her to start out choosing then refused to pay up for damp, under-ripe cotton.
The documentary doesn’t do a lot to clarify the ins and outs of the system girls are railing in opposition to – however possibly you don’t really need a lot context to really feel these girls’s indignant fury boiling over on the unfairness of all of it.
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