Winner of the Special Jury Award for Cinematography at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, Rahul Jain’s debut film Machines is a documentary that beautifully depicts process and the juxtaposition of the workers that make it happen. Ahead of a release next week, Kino Lorber have released the first trailer which previews this look at a textile factory in India, a $40 billion industry.
“The most pointed question asked by Rahul Jain’s documentary Machines comes from the camera,” we said in our review. “By showing us the gigantic textile spools, looms, and washers with only their rhythmic clanks, booms, and bangs opposite the Indian workers applying dyes, mixing chemicals, and ensuring there are no jams to the same sounds, we must wonder which are the “machines” of the title. This is an assembly line of ancient metal units kept moving by a revolving door of migrant workers that start at the age of ten to learn everything in youth and become irreplaceable by their thirtieth anniversary. The entire whole proves to be the machinery of an unseen man sitting in his office with a bank of surveillance screens flickering while he presses buttons on his phone.”
See the trailer below.
Returning to his childhood home of Sachin in India’s Gujarat state, Rahul Jain documents a striking visual paradox: intensely sensual images of colorful fabrics produced in a Dickensian factory in which men and children work tirelessly for a pittance, some barefoot. They are some of the 45 million workers that support the $40 billion Indian textile and garment industries.
Punctuating stunning Steadicam shots, where Mr. Jain’s camera takes viewers into dark, damp and sometimes fiery working spaces, are sparse and sharp testimonials from the workers describing their own experiences – as well as their failed efforts at improving working conditions. One man asks rhetorically: “But what is poverty anyway? Poverty is harassment, Sir.”
Uniquely combining ravishing visuals with social advocacy, MACHINES weaves a moving portrait of people toiling amid pulsating machines, bubbling vats of dye, and colorful, billowing cascades of textiles.
Machines opens on August 9 at Film Forum and will expand in the coming weeks.