
The Deadly Cost of Fashion
In 2013, the Rana Plaza garment factory building outside Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 1,100 workers who made clothing for export. A photojournalist who covered the wreckage and its aftermath follows the paper trail from the rubble back to store shelves in New York, tracing clothing labels found among the debris to major retailers selling the garments produced there. The film moves between the collapse site in Bangladesh, where survivors and grieving families describe the conditions inside the factory, and the United States, where shoppers and executives confront the gap between cheap prices and the labor that makes them possible. Interviews with workers, labor advocates, and industry figures lay out how subcontracting chains obscure responsibility for safety, and how little changed in the factories even after previous fires and collapses. The photographs from the site anchor the reporting, giving faces and names to a disaster usually reduced to a body count.