By Mike Faloon
The notion of "corporate social responsibility" looms large in the landscape of A Decent Factory, and though the entire film focuses on just one case study, the central question remains unanswered: do corporations want to clean up their acts or merely present the illusion of caring? In this case, Hannah, working for Nokia, leads a team in conducting an "ethical assessment" of a factory that supplies components for Nokia. With Nokia owned largely by Finnish stockholders and the factory located in China but run mostly by British managers, I expected the movie to be driven by cultural and class conflicts. "Check" on both fronts, there are ample amounts of both. What I didn't expect were the numerous conflicts along the gender divide. Hannah leads an inspection team staffed solely by women while the factory's managers are all men, so when the inspectors go poking and prodding in search of violations there's an air of teachers reprimanding wayward pupils, the men playing out their roles as "bad boys" by, generally, owning up to their many infractions, taking a mischievous pride in getting away with storing open containers of hazardous chemicals in the washroom and keeping double sets of books, for example. And there's more because 90% of the factory's workers are young, single women over whom the managers lord like an out-dated father/daughter relationship. Throughout the movie we see and hear from the inspectors and the managers, but we don't hear from the filmmaker nor do we have any sense of how the Nokia brass perceives the process of ethical assessments. The lack of another point of view makes it difficult to put what we see on the screen in perspective, to triangulate. A Decent Factory merits a qualified recommendation. In the right context it has a lot to offer, but be sure to see it with a friend so you'll have someone to dissect it with. I got a lot more out of A Decent Factory while thinking about it after I left the theatre than I did while I was actually watching it.
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