China Blue will be shown on March 22 at 9 p.m. at the Little Theatre, and on March 24 at 6.30 p.m. in the BUEI<\p>Tradewinds Auditorium. For more information go to http://www.bermudafilmfest.com.If you were ever remotely curious about the people who made your blue jeans, China Blue is the film for you.China Blue, directed and produced by Israeli filmmaker Micha X. Peled of Teddy Bear Films, follows a group of Chinese teenagers as they leave the family farm in China for big city life in the Sichuan Province.

This documentary film focuses on 16-year-old Little Jasmine. Life in a denim factory as a thread cutter turns out to be quite grim. When Little Jasmine signs up at the factory, the manager tells her, “Work begins at 8 a.m. and overtime begins at 7 p.m.” In fact, Little Jasmine and her friends, many of them under the age of 15, frequently work until 3 a.m. without any overtime pay.

The jeans Jasmine works on are headed for the United States where they will be sold in stores like Wal-Mart. For a $60 pair of jeans, the factory receives a dollar, and Little Jasmine gets a fraction of that. Her salary averages between $30 and $60 a month. China Blue is a shocking film, partly because it was actually filmed in one of China’s better factories. China Blue is a film of contrasts, farm to city, and the life of a labourer compared to that of an owner. The glitzy life of the factory owner — a former police chief — makes a sharp contrast to that of the girls, who live in grim concrete dorms where the cost of their daily meals are taken out of their pay. The factory owner agreed to the making of the film, but it is doubtful he ever realised just how the west would perceive his operation. “The slanted US media portrays China as frightening and totalitarian,” the factory owner tells the camera. “We are a democratic society.”

China Blue shows anything but a democratic society. Totalitarian is exactly how they come across.

The opening scenes of the documentary were re-enacted, which was slightly disappointing, but in the rest of the film, Mr. Peled has achieved some amazing footage of life in the factory. He talks to factory inspectors, managers, and the girls who check the garments over for stray threads.

This is Mr. Peled’s fifth documentary. China Blue seems a natural follow-up to a previous film, ‘Store Wars’ about the controversy in a small town when a plan is launched to built a Wal-mart.