Jason Priestley narrates this documentary by Roger Williams and David McIlvride centered on the high environmental cost of producing fashionable but inexpensive clothes like pre-distressed jeans. The film follows activist Mark Angelo as he visits various countries—India, China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and locales in Africa—where tanneries and textile factories use toxic chemicals in garment production and pour the waste into rivers, resulting in severe pollution. Angelo talks with owners and workers who usually deny that processes they employ are doing ecological damage, although the visual evidence indicates otherwise, as do witnesses who testify to the harmful impact that the pollutants have had on nearby residents, including children. RiverBlue also includes interviews with some designers who were instrumental in concocting the chemical cocktails used in producing the clothing (and now regret the result), researchers who are devising safer (if more expensive) means of achieving the same effects, and supporters of a Greenpeace campaign to detoxify polluted rivers. The question the film inevitably raises is whether consumers will be willing to spend more for clothes in order to protect the environment—laying down a challenge to viewers to join a crusade to save the planet. Presenting both the full-length version and a 52-minute abridgement, this is recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)
RiverBlue
(2016) 95 min. DVD: $50 ($125 w/PPR): public libraries; $295 w/PPR: colleges & universities. DRA. Collective Eye Films. Closed captioned. Volume 33, Issue 2
RiverBlue
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