Maquilapolis (City of Factories), a haunting and poetic essay film from the same year as the more widely known Manufactured Landscapes, portrays the living conditions and everyday struggles of factory workers living and working in the Mexican border town of Tijuana, one of the front-lines of labor exploitation arising from NAFTA and globalization in Mexico. In counterpoint to Maquilapolis, we end the program closer to home, with the short Workers Leaving the Googleplex, a video that attempts to represent the secretive labor conditions at the Google Headquarters in Mountainview and which poignantly and meaningfully fails to bring us inside.
