Red Dust
dir. Karin Mak
University of California – Santa Cruz, USA
Synopsis:
Red cadmium dust drifted freely in China’s nickel-cadmium battery factories owned and operated by GP BATTERIES (GP), one of the world’s top battery manufacturers. Ren, a migrant worker originally from Sichuan, suffers from frequent headaches and breathing difficulties. If untreated, the cadmium poisoning can lead to kidney failure, cancer, and even death.
The film tells an unexamined side of China’s economic development: the resistance, courage, and hope of workers battling occupational disease, and demanding justice from the local government and global capital. Chinese migrant workers are deemed disposable by factory owners and are stereotypically viewed as quiet and passive victims. However, Ren and her comrades, Min, Fu, and Wu fight back. Labor issues are very sensitive in China, and workers who publicly discuss their struggles do so at great risk. The audience discovers along with the filmmaker, a Chinese American, the horrors of the global assembly line.
Director:
Karin T. Mak was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri to immigrants originally from Hong Kong. Mak left the Midwest to pursue a degree in Media Studies at Pomona College. She worked for several years on immigrant and workers’ rights campaigns in California. In 2003, she received the New Voices Fellowship to work with Sweatshop Watch, a Los Angeles-based non-profit advocating for workers’ rights. In 2008, she earned an M.A. in Social Documentation from the University of California Santa Cruz. Mak’s films have screened in Hong Kong, New York, Los Angeles, and Eugene, Oregon.