T-Shirt Travels. . - Film Video - movie review

New Internationalist, June, 2002 by Zoe Druick

directed by Shantha Bloemen

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.

RATING ***

e-mail: shantha@earthlink.net

STAR RATING

EXCELLENT *****

VERY GOOD ****

GOOD ***

FAIR **

POOR *