Bangkok – Bahrain: Labour for Sale

In the early 1980s, Gitai made two documentaries about the effects of the flourishing multinational economy and the tendency of capitalism to make its contradictions invisible by outsourcing them to the distance. Pineapple (1983) followed the production of pineapples from cultivation to sale. Bangkok-Bahrain, shot a year later, is about the sale of human bodies in Thailand, where hundreds of thousands of women work as prostitutes, while an even larger number of men leave the country to work as poorly paid, unskilled laborers in the growth economy of the Arab states south of the Persian Gulf. Gitai resists the temptation to approach his subject through investigative journalism, but simply observes, trusting the audience to draw its own conclusions. (Jurij Meden)

Photo: Austrian Film Museum