Cotton Road
Cotton Road
NR | 05 April 2014 (USA)
Cotton Road Trailers

What does a rural town in South Carolina have to do with China? Americans consume nearly twenty billion new items of clothing each year, and at least one billion of them are made in China. Cotton Road uncovers the transnational movement of cotton and tells the stories of workers lives in a conventional cotton supply chain. From rural farms in South Carolina to factory cities in China, we span the globe to encounter the industrial processes behind our rapacious consumption of cheap clothing and textile products. Are we connected to one another through the things we consume? Cotton Road explores a contemporary landscape of globalized labor through human stories and provides an opportunity to reflect on the ways our consumption impacts others and drives a global economy.

Reviews
Jason Olshefsky (Jayce)

This well-designed and unbiased documentary tells the 2014 story of how cotton grown in South Carolina is shipped all over the world (particularly China) where it is made into fabric and clothing, then shipped back to South Carolina as finished products. Notable to me was how the manual laborers—the American cotton farmers and the Chinese clothing makers—worked in insufferably difficult conditions while each step removed did so in more comfort: the American industrial cotton gin, the refined cotton warehouses, and the Chinese warehouses for fabrics faring better; the shipping companies in both nations and the American retailers faring best of all.My only complaint (and perhaps a bit of filmmaker bias here) was that I found the music to be cloying and melancholic, although many other people liked it.(Note that this review is also on my blog.)

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