Machines

Rahul Jain’s first documentary moves through the inside of an enormous textile factory in Gujarat: corridors, boiling vats of dye, looms that never stop. The camera stays beside the workers and takes the rhythm of people putting in twelve-hour days to send money home. Jain lets the factory owners speak as well as the workers, and the distance between the two vocabularies for the same work is the hardest thing in the film. What emerges is what unregulated industrialisation actually means: unsafe conditions, shifts without end, and labour with no bargaining power. Rodrigo Trejo Villanueva, who photographed it, won the world cinema documentary special jury award for cinematography at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. The film runs seventy-one minutes.