Rahul Jain
Machines
Part of
Machines

Machines

Rahul Jain

2016
75 min.
India, Germany and Finland
English and Hindi
Subtitles: Catalan and Spanish

Thousands of exhausted workers, long 12-hour days, and a huge textile factory in Surat.

Datasheet

Show
Direction
Rahul Jain
Sound
Susmit “Bob” Nath
Production
Rahul Jain, Iikka Verkalahti, Thanassis Karathanos
Photography
Rodrigo Trejo Villanueva
Edition
Rahul Jain, Yaël Bitton
Synopsis

Hypnotic, labyrinthine and horrifying. Thousands of exhausted workers, long 12-hour days, and a huge textile factory in Surat, an industrial city in the Northwest of India. The camera travels, light, through the alleys of this invisible sub-world where humans and machines are the same thing. The expressive sounds generate a mechanical rhythm which brings us closer to the workers’ inner world.

Filmmaker Rahul Jain’s debut feature is brave and personal. The short conversations he has with the workers throw us off and add a new layer to a film that goes beyond reporting labour exploitation. We observe, stunned, a dramatic reality which grabs us with its visual and sound exuberance.

About the direction
Rahul Jain

Rahul Jain

Director

Rahul Jain is a documentary director born in New Delhi, raised in the Himalayas and educated in the...

DocsBarcelona Trajectory

2017
DocsBarcelona Festival · Panorama
Edició 2017
2017
Amnistia Internacional de Catalunya Award DocsBarcelona
Edició 2017
2018
Docs del Mes · January
Edició 2018

Awards and festivals

Amnistia Internacional Catalunya Award · DocsBarcelona
Spain, 2017
Jury Award · Sundance
United States, 2017
Human Values Award · Thessaloniki DFF
Greece, 2016
Jury Award · Thessaloniki DFF
Greece, 2016
Rahul Jain
Machines
Watch the trailer
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Reviews

A bracingly physical documentary about the true cost of cheap labor.

— David Ehrlich · indieWire

This is not an easy film to watch but it is an important one.

— Bruce DeMara · Toronto Star

The dissonance of colorful fabrics and clanking, hellish physical toil makes for a powerful portrait of dehumanized labor conditions in a globalized economy.

— Robert Abele · Los Angeles Times
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