Herald Progress

“Store Wars” director brings new documentary to Ashland Theatre
By RYAN BONNER
H-P Staff Writer

Everyone does it.
“Mom, check out these jeans, they’re only $10.”  
“Great, honey, throw them in the basket.”   
Bargain hunting in America is as natural as brushing our teeth each morning.
But for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction: We buy cheap at the expense of sweatshop workers across the world.
That’s the premise of Micha Peled’s latest documentary, “China Blue,” which hits the screen at the Ashland Theatre at 7 p.m. this Friday, Oct. 7.  It’s the first and only sneak preview of the film in the United States, coming off its world premier at the prestigious Toronto Film Festival.  
Tickets for Friday’s screening, sponsored by Randolph-Macon College, Hanover-Ashland Citizens for Responsible Growth (CRG) and the Town of Ashland, are $10 for adults and $5 for R-MC students, with proceeds benefiting the Ashland Main Street Plaza Project.  
“China Blue” won’t hit American airwaves until next year, but Peled welcomed the opportunity to return to Ashland when CRG called asking if the film could be shown as a fundraiser for the Plaza project.  
“I was delighted to make that available to them,” Peled says. “Where else to open but the Center of the Universe.”
If Peled’s name rings a bell, scan your memory a few years back to that minor controversy surrounding Wal-Mart. Peled’s documentary, “Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town,” put Ashland on the national radar with its in-depth look at citizens’ struggles to keep the retail behemoth at bay.  
“We knew that ‘Store Wars” was a great success so we thought it would be a great opportunity to use that (‘China Blue’) as a fundraiser and benefit for the Plaza,” said Gaillard Owen, a CRG member.  
Peled’s ties to Ashland have remained tight over the years — in fact, a few Ashlanders have stayed at his home in San Francisco while on vacation. Following filming for the Wal-Mart documentary, Peled said he had “never met a town as supportive and friendly as Ashland.”   
From the “Store Wars” experience, Peled began asking more questions and went head on into the issue of globalization and how what ends up on store shelves in America gets here.  
“How do cheap products we buy here so happily get made?” Peled asked himself as he headed to China to discover the disturbing answer.  
“China Blue” follows the exploits of Jasmine — a 16-year-old thread cutter at a blue-jean factory in Shaxi — who works under terrible conditions for pennies an hour.  The Boston Phoenix newspaper picked “China Blue” as the best documentary at the Toronto Festival, calling the film “a heartbreaking, truly unforgettable cinéma-vérité.”   
While Peled can now sit back and admire his work, the making of “China Blue” provides enough drama to be a film of its own.  
Hauling film equipment into China proved to be a quite a hassle as the communist government keeps tight reins on foreign media.   Peled’s crew was able to smuggle equipment across the border, but Chinese police interfered with filming on numerous occasions. A cameraman and associate producer were arrested at one point and tapes were confiscated.  The SARS breakout didn’t make things any easier as it shut down filming for eight months.  
The main challenge, on which the entire film hinged, was getting unrestricted access into a Chinese factory, Peled says.  Telling a factory owner that a film crew wanted to get inside to expose despicable scenes of labor abuse wouldn’t exactly cut it.  
“If we didn’t misrepresent who we were from beginning, they would never have let us in,” Peled says.  
He needed to turn on the charm through the art of deception and Guo Xi Lam, the owner of Shaxi jeans factory, took the bait.  Lam was proud of his newly built factory and Peled told the town’s former police chief that he was making a film about the first generation of China’s entrepreneurs.  Lam instructed his workers to cooperate with Peled’s crew at all times and Song Chen, the associate producer, moved into a factory dormitory where she could form close bonds with the workers.  
The end result is a film that Peled hopes with leave a taste of disgust in the mouths of its viewers.  
“There are a lot of powerful countries around the world that prevent the media from exposing what is going on,” Peled says. “I hope enough people will leave the film saying, ‘I don’t want to get cheap bargains if it means people on the other side of the world are getting exploited’”.   
And if you catch the little Wal-Mart joke at the end of “China Blue”…
Yeah, he couldn’t resist.