Expertly Crafted Movie Review On Mardi Gras: Made In China

David Redmon directed the film Mardi Gras: Made in China in 2005. In this film he wanted to show the problem of exploitative manufacturing caused by the outsourcing of production from the developed countries to China and other developing countries. The film is very unusual, because it focuses not on the production of cars or other technically complicated products and instead the director shows the life-cycle of the beads that are produced in China and shipped to New Orleans where they are usually sold in large numbers during the Mardi Gras festival. Those people who watch the film can see two different worlds. In China the people work long hours, they cannot speak at work and are fined if they underperform. On the contrary, in the USA the people have fun, buy the beads or flash their breasts for beads which the director finds ridiculous. When Mardi Gras ends the beads are thrown away and this is the end of the beads’ life cycle. The film is very interesting to watch, because the scenes are dynamic, there are many interviews and it is possible to see how the people live in the other part of the world. At the same time the director shows only the negative side of the globalization and it seems that he has a very biased opinion about the globalization.
My opinion about globalization changed after I watched this film. Globalization has many benefits – the products are cheap and they can be sold in many international markets, and the people in the poor countries have more chances to find a job. However, after watching this film I realized that not all people are lucky enough to find a decent job. Especially the poorest people who have no education work in the factories such as the one that was shown in the film. Therefore, many people have to suffer every day and are involved in the production of the useless things such as the beads. Unfortunately, there are many similar products which means that thousands of people not only in China, but also in the other countries have to live in the very poor conditions. It turns out that the developing countries benefit from globalization not as much as the developed countries.
In my opinion, people should pay more attention to the overseas origins of the products. However, it is impossible to be conscientious all the time. For example, I consume a lot of products every day and it is difficult to track the origin of most of the products. The companies may have their own factories, subcontract production or create joint ventures. So it is very difficult to understand where exactly the products are produced and in what conditions the employees work. In addition, a lot of companies present their corporate social responsibility reports in which they boast about the improved conditions at the overseas factories, but the reports seem to be image-building and do not address the problem of the poor working conditions. Therefore I would like to pay much more attention to the origin of the products if the companies agreed to be more transparent and report about the overseas production using videos, photographs, etc.
One more issue that the director addresses in the film is the women in the labor force in China. In the film, the factory owner Roger Wang prefers to hire young and unmarried women, because they are diligent and disciplined. They also agree to work long hours for the very little money, because they do not know their legal rights. What is more, it is very easy to manage the rural women who experience the financial problems – this is why Roger Wang has developed a very strict and strange set of rules that make the work at his factory almost unbearable. Such an approach to the staff management shows that the factory owner is a conservative man who thinks that recruiting the women is very profitable. In addition, he is one of the many people that resist gender equality in the Chinese society which was historically dominated by the men. Unfortunately, the owner of the American company that orders the beads in China does not pay enough attention to the problem of gender inequality and thinks that for the workers working at the bead factory is still better than being unemployed.