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Thomas Balmes (director). DVD. 79 mins. Produced by Making Movies (see web link below). €150 ($190, £105)
The blurb on the case of this newly-available DVD says it is a ‘subtle, classic documentary drama featuring two European women and a European male manager who have been thrown into the middle of a foreign culture due to the global economy’.That conjures up visions of Casablanca meets The Office, but in fact it’s a film aimed at the specialist market about mobile phone company Nokia’s efforts to monitor labour conditions in its supply chain.
Everything starts off well enough with a Nokia senior management team away-day, where the participants discuss the business risks of poor supply chain management. This being a Finnish company, all the senior management are talking earnestly while stark naked, having just come out of a team-bonding sauna. But while there is enough to catch the eye in those opening shots, what follows is rather less stimulating. The first part of the film focuses on Nokia’s internal discussions, and the second on a factory audit in China. All well and good, but the problem is that it’s simply a film of meetings. Quite thoughtful and useful meetings, but absolutely not ‘classic documentary drama’.
Things get a bit more interesting when we get to China, where the factory, which makes chargers and cables for Nokia, is no better or worse than thousands of others across the world. The issues that turn up are the bread and butter of ethical audits – below minimum wage pay, too much overtime, people balancing their drinking cups on chemical containers, and so on. The workers, mostly young women, sleep in dormitories because their homes are far away, and they work too hard at a job that is tedious beyond our imaginings.
But is the film worth watching? For someone setting out on the process of looking at their supply chain, then yes. Students of CSR might find it a useful starting point, and snippets of it will be good for training purposes. But if you’re going to watch it all the way through, then take a strong cup of coffee with you – and bear in mind that the naked bits are as exciting as it gets. This may not be aimed at the mainstream, but it could still have been a lot more engaging.
Hilary Sutcliffe
The blurb on the case of this newly-available DVD says it is a ‘subtle, classic documentary drama featuring two European women and a European male manager who have been thrown into the middle of a foreign culture due to the global economy’.That conjures up visions of Casablanca meets The Office, but in fact it’s a film aimed at the specialist market about mobile phone company Nokia’s efforts to monitor labour conditions in its supply chain.
Everything starts off well enough with a Nokia senior management team away-day, where the participants discuss the business risks of poor supply chain management. This being a Finnish company, all the senior management are talking earnestly while stark naked, having just come out of a team-bonding sauna. But while there is enough to catch the eye in those opening shots, what follows is rather less stimulating. The first part of the film focuses on Nokia’s internal discussions, and the second on a factory audit in China. All well and good, but the problem is that it’s simply a film of meetings. Quite thoughtful and useful meetings, but absolutely not ‘classic documentary drama’.
Things get a bit more interesting when we get to China, where the factory, which makes chargers and cables for Nokia, is no better or worse than thousands of others across the world. The issues that turn up are the bread and butter of ethical audits – below minimum wage pay, too much overtime, people balancing their drinking cups on chemical containers, and so on. The workers, mostly young women, sleep in dormitories because their homes are far away, and they work too hard at a job that is tedious beyond our imaginings.
But is the film worth watching? For someone setting out on the process of looking at their supply chain, then yes. Students of CSR might find it a useful starting point, and snippets of it will be good for training purposes. But if you’re going to watch it all the way through, then take a strong cup of coffee with you – and bear in mind that the naked bits are as exciting as it gets. This may not be aimed at the mainstream, but it could still have been a lot more engaging.
Hilary Sutcliffe
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