The director, known for her audacity in her work through her feature documentary “Gulabi Gang”, brings us to the now abandoned world of the Bengali jute mills. Once the demand began to crumble as plastic began to dominate the market, so did the factories and the mills. As a result of their downfall, the wages of the employees began to fall and the markets for the mills began to shut. One too many jute mills and factories shut down, and when compared to earlier, the profitability of the business went down significantly.
The film gives off a false impression that jute is no longer available in the market, but that is not exactly the case. Jute is still being produced and sold in bulk as India remains a top exporter along with other countries. Bengal is also renowned for being the focal point for jute growing and production alongside India. Just like anything else, there are some issues that the industry is facing, for example, the material of the jute is still being debated as we try to figure out if it is eco-friendly or not. However, just like the material, there are also limitations as well such as the expectation of a briefing being assumed to be a requirement.
By watching the “Golden Thread”, one gets an impression of laborers currently at factories which appear to be time machines, where both the equipment and the working conditions are selling Neolithic concepts. The machinery is in disarray. The laborers’ faces are lifeless and fatigued. Jain seems to display their tasks in a new light, capturing sweeping views of the busy interiors of the factories and their moving parts and mechanisms. All is loud, all is noisy, all is in motion, and all elicits this feeling of eradicated life forces. While talking to several employees about the good old days, she learns how most of them have lost their vision and how they feared how factories filled with automated looms would at some point have needed only 50% of the employees. There is a staggering sense of naïveté in this disgust for resilience and gentleness towards harsh modern times when one could just work with their hands and get paid.
How old machines and warmhearted workers look is the history that has been so conveniently forgotten which is the history of abuse of worker exploitation, worker rights and most basic of safety measures such as simple common-sense working safe costumes. It is hard to fathom how politics continued for so long but only because there is a fine line between being out of fashion and preventing accidents is the primal praise the director have for the automated assembly line.
Sunlight and Air mix with Jute Dust Making it a Reality But in the real sense it is the cause of several respiratory illnesses. When it comes to work-related accidents, we remain oblivious to any statistics. There are alarming figures in the Analytical study on the causes of industrial health hazards in jute industry and possible management there in for industrial safety improvement.
Even external assistance seems out of reach in resolving the creation of conspiracies swirls around the cases of 2014 jubilation of workers who murdered a jute mill CEO.
The topics of the film intertwines with one another quite loosely so that none of them are developed. There is insufficient adequate research done. There is no dominant character who has emotional relations and spends more than a cameo in the movie. Factory life is followed by some youth’s birthday bash and conversation about their off-work dreams. There are issues of class conflict and social injustice. For this documentary though its difficult to see a sequential pattern. Nobody is surprised by the conclusion that the increase of synthetic materials and the lower consumption of jute is detrimental to many people’s incomes.
However, this topic also holds significant importance and is not new to the modern world. Similarly, when the jute crisis is addressed in the ‘Golden Thread’, it doesn’t delve into interesting or engaging themes. It is a mere glance of the old factories that require renovation: a rather poor excuse for a film.
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