Produced, directed, presented and shot by Leah Borromeo.
Executive Producer - Claire Lewis
Taster edited by Nick Street.
Additional footage / cutaways provided by Ellie Gurney.
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This taster has been selected for the Branchage Film Surgery at the London Short Film Festival, 2010.
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When you bag a bargain, do you think about who’s paid for it? Leah Borromeo presents a 60-minute probe into the soft cotton of your pants, the pesticides used produce that cotton, and the people who perish for your pretty panties.
At its height, up to 26 Indian cotton farmers a day drank pesticides to kill themselves out of the debt they got into in order to farm. The country where 4 of the world's 10 richest people live is also 70% agrarian.
Journalist Leah Borromeo traveled to India and met with a suicide widow, a doctor at a local district hospital, farmers and workers along the cotton production chain and a 23-yr old man with a wife and two children who tried to kill himself over £500 he owed.
Armed with appalling stories from the bottom end of the fashion food chain, she goes to the UK high street. How many shoppers think about how clothes get on their backs? With this new knowledge about suicides and pesticides, what good can you do - or is this yet another poverty panacea laid on by the Guardian-reading classes? Do clothing labels and fashion designers care? What do you think can be done?
