Machines (2016) ****

Inhuman and dangerous working conditions in textile factories were a major feature of what one learned as a schoolboy about the Industrial Revolution in Britain, including in my home county of Lancashire. But in several parts of the developing world they are an ongoing reality. Rahul Jain’s hour-long documentary, Machines (available for four weeks via BBCiPlayer), is an uncompromising promenade through the grim halls of a tacky textile firm in Surat, Gujarat, where predominantly young men — some of them mere boys — work 12 hours a day for a pittance doing tasks that are at the same time mind-numbingly boring and dangerous, most without any form of protective clothing whatsoever. No wonder some nod off on the job, or find a pile of material to crash out on. The amount of dialogue in the film is minimal, as the camera graphically tells the story, but there are a few short interviews. Many workers borrowed money to make the long journey from their homes in Uttar Pradesh and other deprived regions in order to find work, but they barely earn enough to feed themselves. Inevitably by the latter half of the film the Western viewer is asking mentally why they don’t unionise, but that question is indirectly answered by an almost fatalistic resignation among the workforce. Politicians have come and gone and said encouraging things but then done nothing; at least a film-maker shows the harsh reality to the world. The factory manager in his office, lazily glancing at TV monitors watching over the shop floor, believes the workers have nothing to complain about. If they were given more money they would only waste it on tobacco, he says. And in what for me is the most striking sequence in the film, one is reminded that these poor wage-slaves are not the bottom of the pile. As some of them pour toxic sludge over the perimeter wall of the factory, young kids on the other side scrabble around in it to see if there is anything in it they can retrieve and sell.