The Lost Hours of One Hundred Thousand Female Workers: How a Vietnam Factory Turned Time into Prison

LOCARNO – Among the films selected at the Locarno Film Festival, one of Europe's most important film festivals, there's a film simply called "She." It's a documentary—co-produced by Luce Cinecittà , among others—that tells an abnormal, almost inhuman, and hidden story. It tells the story of a huge factory in Vietnam , an electronics industrial hub where 100,000 people live and work, almost all of them women . Exploited women. But to say "exploited" is still an understatement. Women whose lives are sucked away. 12-hour shifts, both day and night, iron discipline, thorough checks. For these women , there is almost no life outside the factory .

These women's time is sacrificed for a little money. This is a system based on the intensive exploitation of human lives , just as animals are exploited in factory farms. The film's story unfolds through anonymous testimonies of workers who undergo this immense sacrifice to send a little money home.

"She" is a choral tale, in which women share their stories, protected by anonymity, and in which the workers reenact for 12 hours what happens daily during 12-hour shifts in the factory. The International Labour Organization sponsors the film and the associated social impact campaign.

In some ways, it feels like a science fiction film . And yet, it's the present, a present in which we are the robots. Or rather, they are the people who work there. "She is a film about hidden resistance, about these people's right to exist, not just as a workforce," says Parsifal Reparato , who directed the film. "But it's also a proposal: what the workers are putting on display could be the beginning of a new story." Meanwhile, however, there's a model of progress that is unsustainable for any human body , a model that is followed in a factory that seems to be the epitome of everything done in the name of profit.