Daughters of Bangladesh Garment Factory Workers is a short documentary which follows the personal stories of 5 girls aged between 7 and 15. The film gives an intimate insight into their world, their relationships with their mothers and how factory work shapes their lives. Daughters of Bangladesh is Lensational’s first video journalism project featuring and created by the daughters themselves. This film advocates for corporations to commit to supply chain transparency as well as advancing the welfare of the most vulnerable workers and their families.

Lensational is an award-winning, non-profit social enterprise, with the mission of empowering women through photography and videography. For Daughters of Bangladesh Garment Factory Workers, they have partnered with Rainbow Collective, a documentary producer focused on human, children and social rights, to create a film as a part of an ongoing media training scheme at Nagorik Uddyog, offering children of garment workers a route into further education.

The Q&A discussion following the film will focus on the unheard voices of overlooked women in journalism and how to get these narratives into the public eye. The girls in the film are able to share their personal stories with the world on how garment factory work affects their lives indirectly, reflecting a variety of emotions and capturing moments of intimate visual stories. Our speakers, with a range of journalistic experiences will focus on how best to continue to empower women such as the girls in the film.

Watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldp2-a1DG2c&app=desktop

Moderator

Lucile Stengel: Head of Social Media and editor Lensational

Lucile currently works for the BBC World Service, where she dedicates her time to understanding and better servicing the BBC’s audience in developing countries, as well as developing a new impact framework for the organisation. Lucile has a particular interest in the interplay of gender, culture, and the media, an area she has been researching since university. She holds a BSc in Political Science, a MA in Global Communications and Strategy, and a MSc in Local Economic Development from Sciences Po and the LSE. She has developed a repertoire of research and strategy skills in her previous experiences across the media and third sector, and regularly contributes to gender and social justice publications.

Speakers

Richard York is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Rainbow Collective

Alongside their own award-winning broadcast and cinematic documentaries (Al Jazeera, Britdoc, SABC), Rainbow Collective have designed and facilitated projects in countries including Bangladesh, Jamaica, South Africa, Cambodia and Turkey, empowering marginalised children and adults to produce powerful and effective documentaries and animation. The films their students produce have proved equally at home screening at international film festivals as they are at the centre of campaigns for real social change. Since 2008 Rainbow Collective have worked closely with garment working communities and trade unions to improve working and living conditions through films and training projects, including playing a key role in the successful campaign to secure full compensation for the families affected and bereaved by the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh.

Inequality blights our societies – the panel that gathered for the Inequality Debate at the Frontline Club on 30 January had no doubts about that. Charles Sennot, of GlobalPost, put the problem into perspective: the gap between rich and poor in developed economies is growing so fast that inequality is reaching developing country levels.

You can watch the debate here:

For Chris Johnes of Oxfam, this is because trickle down hasn’t happened, and that “work is no longer a guarantee of moving out of poverty”. He further argued that inequality damages our economies:

“A lot of businesses would have survived [the recession] if people in the lower parts of the economy actually had more purchasing power.”

Alex Cobham, from Save the Children, chimed in, arguing that inequality also causes social as well as economic harm, as it undermines self-confidence – making it even harder for those at the bottom to move up the social ladder.

Author and journalist Michael Moran, put the problem into a global perspective. He argued that opening up global markets meant that “3.5 billion who were formally in state controlled economies, now compete with you and me”. Faced with global competition from low-waged workforces, raising salaries in developed economies to tackle inequality is impossible.

How could we have let our societies reach this stage? A member of the audience suggested that “mainstream economics . . . is providing a cover for the idea that resources are actually concentrated in the hands of the few”. For the chair, Paddy Coulter, this begged the question “have we got the right kind of economics”?

Probably not, suggested Faiza Shaheen, of the New Economics Foundation. For her, before any progress is made, economists and politicians must acknowledge that inequality is a problem in the first place – it can no longer be ignored.

However, some in the audience thought that a change in political outlook was unlikely:

“[In a society] which is obsessed with the short-term . . . how can you convince people that [tackling inequality] will pay off in the long run? If you don’t get results immediately, people will abandon the policy”.

Others were more optimistic, asking ‘How do we move to solutions? How do we implement policies that serve the collective interest?’

For Sennot, it has to start with awareness – more stories from the ground need to be told. Johnes cautioned the audience, however, that there could be no turning back to the golden age of capitalism:

“We can’t engineer it back again.”

In the end, Moran perhaps caught the essence of the issue, arguing that:

“For the United States in the 21^st century, or Britain, to be experiencing  inequality levels that are essentially the same as they were at the turn of the 20^th century . . . is a disgrace.”

A charming evening at the Frontline Club focused on a remarkably difficult theme: increasing disparities between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, and what they imply for our future.

Director of the think tank ResPublica, Philip Blond hosted the event, infusing it with humor as he led the panelists in a debate about the documentary Four Horsemen, which premiered in London at Frontline on 27 April. The documentary blames neoliberal and neoclassical economic theory for paving the way to an increasingly unjust, unstable, and unequal world.  Last night, the film’s director Ross Ashcroft elaborated its points with clarity and passion.

Daniel Ben-Ami journalist and author of Ferraries for All:  In Defense of Economic Progress, argued that the documentaries biggest mistake was to underestimate the role of the state in today’s crisis. Emeritus economics professor Victoria Chick, meanwhile, commented on the documentary’s suggestion that we return to the gold standard.  

"I sort of flinched," she said.  "Everything I’ve always known about the gold standard was so repressive, and it was a very deflationary regime.  [I] like the courageous quality of Minsky who said, ‘alright, I know banks are unstable, but they’re worth it, because they provide productive investment.’  Well that was when they did lend for productive investment.  And now they no longer do."

Giving voice to the sentiment of the evening, Mark Braund author of Four Horsemen:  The Survival Manual complained,

"We have democratic institutions which aren’t delivering democratic outcomes.  And that’s because I think too few people are interested enough to engage with what are quite complex ideas about how the ecomony works."

"X-box, cheap lager, and mass media" were Ashcroft‘s culprits for the public’s malaise in the face of a system that he believes is increasingly stacked against them.  

At several points, panelists emphasized that change would have to come "from the bottom up," but as one audience member regretted, what change "from the bottom up" really meant seemed hard to elucidate.

Amidst today’s troubling trends, Blond noted with optimism that ethics had returned to conversations about society and economics:

"This is an exciting time we’re in:  the left is arguing for ethics, when for many years ethics was akin to fascism and authoritarianism and being oppressive…  I think that’s genuinely a transformative, interesting moment."

Yet he ended the night on a sadder note, recalling a recent trip to his hometown of Liverpool:

"I was going around the northern neighborhoods, and people there haven’t worked since the first wave of globalization.  The deindustrialization there has essentially condemned three generations to endemic poverty.  What’s going to happen next is there’ll be a second wave, or a third wave, or a fourth wave, of automation, and that will take out middle class jobs.  And that’s already happening:  teaching, accounting, lawyers, etc….

Watch the full event here: