T-Shirt Travels
This film clearly demonstrates how neo-liberal free-market economics has destroyed the Zambian economy, putting disabling debt repayment to the IMF in the place of social spending on education, health and welfare. Squeezed by a colonial legacy of resource extraction, Cold War politics and free-market rhetoric, Zambia has ended up as the world’s largest US flea market. Although the idea is novel in terms of filmic expression, Bloemen takes a fairly generic approach, combining interviews with experts — members of the Zambian Government, as well as historians and economists — with more ethnographic footage of ordinary people’s lives and her own explanatory voice-over. The strength of the film is the way in which it traces the transatlantic journey of huge quantities of used clothing from the US to Africa as a way of visualizing and understanding unequal and unjust global economic relations. At just under an hour, T-Shirt Travels would be eminently suited to educational settings.
- Product information
- directed by Shantha Bloemen
- Star rating
- Product link
- shantha@earthlink.net
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Voices from the margins:
Multimedia: video, podcasts, and more.
- Poetry Slam in Zimbabwe
- The House of Hunger poetry slam held in Zimbabwe in 2006, and organised by the Pamberi Trust, showcased young artists performing inspirational work on issues from corporate power to child soldiers. The video features four of the poets.
Published by Pambazuka News.
- Iranian women speak out
- 3 March 2007, London. Women's rights activists marched through the English capital last week to celebrate International Women's Day with a protest against the misogyny of the Islamic regime in Iran and the threat of invasion by the US. Hear the voices of Iranian feminists Azar and Leila Parnian and the sounds of the demonstration as it passed through the heart of the city. Click here to learn more about the campaign.
Produced by Heidi Bachram.
- Raised Voices audio:
- Benny from West Papua on Corporate Power
- Vinayan from India on agriculture
