The Documentary

Earnest youths arrive young and healthy from the countryside, only to be discarded by a broken system after suffering debilitating accidents, or diagnosed with leukemia from exposure to benzene – a solvent commonly used in polishing cell phone and tablet screens.

The role of the U.S. companies involved will be explored and revealed to American consumers in the hope they will take action to demand improved working conditions.

The main characters in the film are young workers, many of them teenagers, from China’s electric factories who are struggling to get compensation after having been injured by faulty machinery or poisoned by leukemia-causing chemicals they handled at work.

The workers have been filmed in hospitals, hotel rooms and at home in their villages where they often return,  discarded by their employers. Many hospitals keep surveillance cameras in patients’ rooms and monitor their movements in an effort to prevent them from speaking to the media and NGO’s, hence our need for interviews in hotel rooms on occasion.

In some cases these accidents happen after the workers – who receive virtually no training regarding the hazards – have only been in their jobs for days or weeks.