Fashion victims

We produced the documentary ‘Fashion victims’ after years of study on a particular kind of child labour exploitation, exclusively female, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, within the textile supply chain.
This form of modern slavery called ‘Sumangali scheme’ foresees the recruitment of young women. The adolescent girls come from rural areas, live in conditions of poverty and need money to get married and to provide their own dowry. So they’re being sent from their own families, through a system of illegal recruitment, to work in the textile industries.
The interest for the stories of these young women - sometimes still children, comes from the evident aberration of the global social, production and economic system, and of the dynamics and values on which it is based, drawing from local situations of need.
Remote in space and invisible, the young workers are first of all slaves to society’s conventions, obligations and habits.
Post-modernity increasingly reduces real life spaces and experiences to images of life and experiences.
To appear is a must of our times. Thus on one side the necessity of chasing the dream of a happy marriage and an emancipated life, and on the other that of always looking beautiful, brand new and fashionable become factors of imprisonment and annihilation. The results are different in their consequences and not comparable. There are girls who in the spinning mills lose their health, are raped and hang themselves. In the West, where the majority of the garments produced in India is exported, there are consumers feeling poorer and poorer, and always pushed by the “need” of keeping up appearances, of having new clothes.

Pinocchio asks Geppetto for clothes to go to school and he lovingly gets one done. So he runs to look at his reflection, happy of what he sees, and declares: “Now I look like a gentleman!” Geppetto replies: “Indeed. But remember that fine clothes do not make a gentleman unless they are neat and clean.”

Clean clothes are fair clothes.

How to tell these stories in a complex and distant and cultural context, stories that the people and the society experiencing them are reluctant to tell?
This question could only be answered on the ground. What had been thought and written before the shooting was upturned from the very first day of filming the documentary. So it has been necessary to go through the account of the mere facts - accidents, escapes, murders - in order to inquire about the views of life of the girls involved.
Facts being recounted with astonishing dryness, clearness and conciseness, often only after having received permission to speak from a man: an uncle, a father…
The painful result is the common trait of a life stolen, where personal desire no longer has room, or importance. As I listened to what was before me, I have tried to understand what was the right distance, having often to react promptly in the fear of not being able to close a single shot, or even the whole film. It has not been rare to laugh in a language foreign both to me and to the girls and women interviewed, despite the issues addressed.
What has made this work possible has been the sense of closeness and affinity; the intimate awareness of the threads uniting lives apparently so far apart - those making the clothes and those wearing them. Clothes that should be clean and not only fashionable and cheap.