The True Cost

"The True Cost" is a documentary by Andrew Morgan which explores the whole network of clothe's production and consume, unlatching the concept of fast fashion and his implications. Approaching the social and envirement impacts, the film shows the true cost of the fashion consume in this age, including the physical and psiquic ills caused by the chlote's production in poor countries without labor laws, ground's contamination caused by the agriculture required for the sector's industry and the social problems related to the economic policies and globalized production chain. The great problem of this film is the attempt to investigate all the issues intrinsic of the fashion cost. When treating multiple questions, the documentary ends up becoming a shallow investigation, without deepening and solidity. This desorganization is allied to a lack of interactions with the viewer and boring interviews, besides not including important social actors of the fashion production.

This documentary clear shows the exploitative methods used by Big companies and owners and how the slavery has been outsourced to 3rd world countries. This documentary also invokes the responsibility of an average citizen towards our environment. Being a citizen of a 3rd world country like India, i completely understand the situation of the workers in india and the neighboring countries and how our people are being exploited in every industry.

One thing we need to understand is our role in the society. Everyone's role is being reduced to a role of "consumer". Think about it.

Don't worry about the Metascore and Critics reviews. They don't understand how important this film is.

I gave it a five since it exposes the true ugly and dark underside of the clothing industry. With all but the very high end clothing produced offshore in the West, a massive industry of unregulated, nonunion dangerous sweatshops in the lowest labor cost nations produces most of our clothing. Think of that next time you buy a 100 dollar shirt and see that it was made in Vietnam probably for about $2.00 cost.

However the movie takes a hard left turn in the second half. They have the requisite video segment from a Fox News talking-head about sweatshops and how they might really serve a purpose. Then they interview Marxist economic Richard Wolf who blames the problem on not on idiot consumers or corrupt governments in producer nations, but on capitalism and calls for a new system. What new system? Socialism of course. Every useful idiot academic these days is in love with socialism.

Capitalism is not the problem. It is brain dead materialistic consumers who turned shopping from necessity into a weekly hobby and became addicted to cheap overseas products. Generations X and Y who consume like fools. Look at the ages of those waiting in line on Black Friday and in front of an Apple Store when Tim Cook announces the newest $1200 iPhone. These are all younger Americans charging in to buy the products of sweatshops. Change their minds and you solve a great part of the problem. The other issue not addressed is the fault of the governments of the producer nations. No unions, labor laws, decent wages or environmental controls. The movie implies that these governments has no power against these corporations. Sure they do. This was the situation in the US 100+ years ago and we solved it. But somehow the third world is not at fault. In this film. The Western capitalists are at fault in the logic of the producers and writers. Worth watching with a critical eye.

The True Cost documents filmmaker Andrew Morgan's efforts to understand the world of fast fashion (with it's "fifty two seasons a year" marked by $5 shirts and $20 pairs of jeans), a world that's only existed for a few decades and has had enormous impacts on people's lives in both high- and low-income economies. It's a well-traveled and wide-ranging film, sometimes so much so that you get a bit lost for it's jumping from one place to another. But the economic systems that connect garment workers in countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia to North American, European, and Asian consumers are complicated, often intentionally obscure, and they affect people and ecosystems all over the globe, so the film's wide angle view makes sense. To covers so much means that the film sometimes jumps quickly from topic to topic, without digging very deeply into any one issue for long (towards the end of the film, for example, its critique of consumerist / materialist capitalism follows logically from all we've seen, but the discussion can't do justice to the complexity of the questions posed). But for a documentary meant to introduce the topic, that's a reasonable directorial choice to make. Beautifully filmed, with passionate, informed, and compassionate interviewees, The True Cost is worth watching.

A primitivist stance in which the losers of their markets (film production, fashion, journalism) gang against what they call "big business". Meaning the workers in poor countries would be far better crouched in the rice paddy under the Sun, than having a wage. Yet somehow, the entitlements on which the Western losers live are NOT to be sent to the poor workers.

This is yet another refined argument for protectionism and closed borders.