芬兰影展开幕影片：A DECENT FACTORY

　　大家反馈都很好，就多贴点资料。
　　

　　The Nokia Corporation is the world's largest manufacturer of mobile phones. Based in Finland, it employs approximately 50,000 people in more than 50 countries throughout the world. But is Nokia worried about the working conditions of thousands of young Chinese women employed by their suppliers to manufacture all those little bitty parts that go into your cell phone? Or is Nokia more concerned that you might hold them to account if you knew that their workers earn less than the Chinese minimum wage? This investigation explores the cultural divide (Chinese workers, British managers, Finnish executives) and the even more dramatic gender divide (women workers and investigators, male managers and executives) that go a long way toward explaining why the investigators' recommendation that opens buckets of toxic chemicals not be stored where the workers take their tea is met with this response: "Ok, take them into the kitchen!"
　　

　　IMDB上一个人的评论：
　　Author: James McNally from Toronto, Canada
　　
　　I saw this film at the 2005 Hot Docs festival in Toronto. In this documentary, Finnish cellphone giant Nokia sends its recently hired Ethics and Environmental Specialist to China to audit one of its suppliers' factories. But instead of a manifesto on the dangers of outsourcing and globalization, we get a much smaller film about cultural differences. Well, it's not exactly that simple, either. I guess this one just didn't catch fire for me the way I thought it would. Sure, the Finns find labour law violations. But in the presence of the factory's European management, they tend to focus on small things (some chemicals are stored near the toilets) and gloss over the bigger issues (not a single employee at the factory has signed a contract). The truth is that the entire Chinese manufacturing sector operates by very different rules than the Europeans are used to. I looked forward to hearing the auditors interview the mostly-female employees of the factory, but when they do, they discover the sort of complaints made by factory workers everywhere: their superiors insult them, the cafeteria food is bad. The truth is that none of them actually complain about the low wages, or the forced overtime or mandatory deductions for food and accommodation. It seems like they are content to live in single-sex company dormitories. Things that seem to horrify the progressive Finns don't seem to faze most of the Chinese.
　　So, at least by focusing in so tightly on one factory, I think it's impossible to look at the bigger issues involved in globalization and the migration of jobs overseas. Many of the issues seem to involve more than just economics. There is a lot of cultural disconnection going on as well.
　　That's not to say I'm an apologist for unfair labour practices. There are widespread problems with almost all of China's factories, hinted at by the film. Most factories keep at least two sets of books; one to show the government and auditors like Nokia's, and one more accurate set. And the issue of government corruption is not even mentioned.
　　So, even though the film failed to address these issues in a larger context, it was still an enlightening visit to a place where most of the world's manufacturing will be done in the future, if it's not already being done there now.
　　

　　[这个贴子最后由老猪在 2005/07/07 01:09am 第 1 次编辑]
　　
　　http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0526,peranson1,65383,20.html
　　How to make lots of money while keeping a clean conscience
　　by Mark Peranson
　　Thomas Balmés's fly-on-the-wall documentary uses your cell phone charger as a case study in how multibillion-dollar multinationals are dealing with multihorrible working conditions in the overseas plants run by their subcontractors. From Nokia's HQ in Finland, we're catapulted to the Chinese special economic zone of Shenzhen, where an earnest ethical manager and a consultant-for-hire undertake Nokia's first ever "ethical suppliers' assessment" to satisfy their investors. They're guided though the factories by Richard, a cynical British mid-level manager with the jovial mien of a sober soccer hooligan; his jokes become increasingly bitter once the factory begins to leak violations like an oil tanker that's hit an iceberg.
　　As in your typical Chinese factory, conditions are substandard and many workers earn about enough a month to download a P. Diddy ringtone (the underlying problem, indentured servitude, is never discussed). Balmés focuses on the forced implementation of corporate responsibility. The subtext is sexual: Not only are these female consultants (one with a major holier-than-thou attitude) telling these guys (Western and Chinese) how to run their plant ethically while remaining competitive, a large percentage of the workers are Chinese girls who will be forced to have abortions if they're discovered to be pregnant. Balmés frames his film by quoting Milton Friedman—"the one and only social responsibility of business is to make profits"—and A Decent Factory is just as much about the motives of the people asking the questions as those of the people avoiding the answers. Though the weight remains on the side of the interrogators, don't be too sure Balmés hasn't uncovered this century's latest twist on exploitation: ethical colonialism.
　　

　　A Decent Factory / A Decent Factory
　　Thomas Balmés / France, Finland / 2004 / 79 min.
　　Experienced documentary filmmaker Thomas Balmés, author of the highly regarded film The Gospel According to the Papuans, decided to examine in the style of direct cinema how socially responsible the firm NOKIA truly is towards its employees. The directors of this world leader in the manufacture of mobile phones are proud not only of the success of the company, but also of their responsible behavior towards their employees. This is supposed to apply to their Chinese subcontractors as well and they hope to include this in their marketing in order to improve further on their own image. For this purpose they employed a specialist in the maintenance of basic employee rights, Hanna Kaskinen, who together with her British colleague set off for China to perform a thorough inspection of the workings of the factory there with special regard given to the employees' working conditions. It slowly comes to the surface that ninety percent of the workers are comprised of women living across from the factory in ramshackle living quarters, with eight women sharing one small room and working six days a week. They have a right to the minimum wage only after thirty-six hours of overtime. According to one of the workers, they spend the majority of their money on food as the meals in the local canteen are very poor. The reality in the factory of the Chinese subcontractor as captured by the film crew shows itself to be rather different from what the directors of the firm NOKIA would have wished.
　　

　　555555555　猪伯伯：拜托你用CHINESE OK!偶好伤心啊！
　　

　　一边哭一边查字典！伯伯你好残忍啊！
　　

　　Thomas Balmès was born in Paris in 1969. He studied at the Institut Supérieur d’Etudes Cinématographiques (ISEC), then became involved in the production of documentaries for various TV channnels both as an independent producer and cinematographer. He set up his own production company, TBC Productions, in 1992. He started producing and directing various documentaries, as one on James Ivory 1993 and another on Michelangelo Antonioni in 1995. His last films The Gospel according to the Papuans & Waiting for Jesus - like his two former films Bosnia Hotel & Maharajah Burger - deal with the hegemony of the western culture, religion and values, this time through the evangelization of a tribe in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.
　　
　　DIRECTOR INTERVIEW
　　THOMAS BALMES
　　Thursday 3 February 2005
　　
　　
　　
　　BBC Four: How did the project start?
　　Thomas Balmès: The commissioning editor YLE in Finland, Iikka Vehkalahti, suggested I use my anthropological background to look at Nokia in the same way that I had previously made films about tribes in Kenya, Papua New Guinea and India. Because the corporation is such a big part of Finland - it makes up almost 70% of the stock market in Helsinki - they couldn't find a Finnish director who could take a neutral look at the company. So I accepted and the nightmare began...
　　BBC Four: It was hard to find the story?
　　TB: Yes. Nokia is the most cautious of the high-tech companies: every single person who works at Nokia has a contract with a non-disclosure clause that doesn't allow them to talk about their day-to-day work, even within their own family. On top of that, the Finns are not the most willing to be on camera - they are all very shy and have low self-esteem - the worst I have ever seen in my life. At the beginning, I thought about doing a film in the village of Nokia where the company started. It's divided between the workers, some of whom were communists and refused stocks in the 1980s, and the others who bought them. You now have a few thousand people who are either millionaires or don't get any dividends at all. In any other country you would imagine this would create conflict and jealously, but that's not the case here. They all live in the same houses and drive the same cars. It's absolutely fascinating but nobody's willing to talk about it.
　　BBC Four: How did you find Hanna, the Finnish ethical consultant?
　　TB: I spent 18 months filming boring Nokia meetings all over the world before I met her. A French director at Nokia told me about this woman who for the last five years had been refusing incentives offered to the management, now worth a lot of money. She was just starting to push the Nokia management to take a new position with ethical issues (before, she had been in charge of the environmental issues). I found it very interesting because it touched on the issue - can you be a capitalist and be ethical at the same time? I was also lucky to be in at the beginning of a process - Hanna was about to do Nokia's first ever ethical assessment. When I arrived in China no one really knew who I was or what I was doing and this confusion allowed me to film.
　　BBC Four: A lot of films about this subject seem content only to focus on the plight of the workers. Were you wary of that?
　　TB: I don't want to make films about issues that oblige me to be too simplistic. I do have testimonies from some of the workers in the film, and Chinese factories are much worse than European ones. But I don't point this out too much, because to me this isn't the focus of the film. I even thought about only filming from the side of the factory managers because it's not a film that is trying to describe workers' conditions. I wanted it to be about more than us feeling bad about how workers were being exploited. It questions how much you can hold on to your ideals. Finland is the most advanced country in the world in terms of social welfare and equality. Nevertheless, when the biggest company in the country needs to be global then they have to play the game the American way. That's the main point of the film - how can you resist? Especially when you are being traded every day in New York, 90% of the ownership is based in the United States, and they keep you on the leash and don't allow you big margins on how you should behave.
　　BBC Four: From a British perspective it's entertaining to see the English factory manager, Richard. He's funny, and brutally honest...
　　TB: He is the star of the film for me because he is very cynical. The way he speaks about the workers is the key to what makes the film work. He felt so self-confident about everything: about the minimum wages and all that. But he only thought in terms of comparing the factory to other Chinese factories, rather than thinking about the factory itself, which doesn't have good conditions.
　　BBC Four: Were you shocked by anything you saw in China?
　　TB: The factory really looked like a camp: they sleep in the factory, they work in the factory. That's common in China, but it was definitely close to how you'd think of a jail. Apart from that I was shocked by how Richard, the British factory manager, talked about the workers and by the kind of non-climax you have at the end. You expect there to be a major confrontation, which is where you realise the weakness and efficiency of what's going on behind all these changes. It's much more about being able to say we've done an assessment rather than anything else.
　　BBC Four: Nokia seem aware of that though. As one of the managers says in the film, are they hiring ethical consultants because they want to change the world, or to mention it in a marketing brochure?
　　TB: I'm glad that we raised that question right at the beginning and it's something which I think the film answers quite well. In the end, Hanna left Nokia to become a nurse - she decided to act not globally, but locally in her village hospital. I think the fact that she did that is quite revealing.
　　

　　啊！可惜的是放映时间让我和老公有点为难，，，其实很想去的。。。希望将来有机会可以看到！不只是芬兰的，还有韩国的，日本的，更多更多异国电影。。。