“Cotton Road” is a creative documentary that takes viewers from farm to factory to reveal an industrial story about the transformation of cotton and the people who do the work. Driven by the questions: Who makes the products that we consume? And, where do they come from? “Cotton Road” reflexively explores transnational cotton’s global reach to reveal a tapestry of life stories connected through cotton. We meet Carl Brown, an Aiken, SC farmer, and his lone African American assistant, Grover; Latino migrant workers who gin cotton in Cameron, South Carolina for 16 hours a day; Ms. Jiang, owner of the Yuan Tian Clothing Company in Shanghai, who struggles to meet the low price offered by western companies; and Liu Cheng Feng, a young teenager who weaves a heddle loom more than twelve hours a day in the industrial city of Changzhou in Jiangsu Province. “Cotton Road” takes viewers from a small, family farm to a burgeoning city of 20 million people to tell a story of globalized labor and cotton, weaving a portrait of the work and workers we never see and the products that they make.

As a 21st century travelogue, “Cotton Road” is about the workers in this commodity flow and the industrial landscapes that are the backdrop to their experience. It is also a film that visualizes industrial processes normally hidden from view, such as the ginning of cotton and the dying of yarn. From the sowing of genetically engineered seeds and the chemicals they were bred to withstand, to the mechanized work of cotton ginning, farm labor is populated by men. After America’s cotton arrives into massive ports in China, yarn making, fabric weaving, and clothing production is undertaken by young women who have left their families for difficult work in factory cities. Through their stories, “Cotton Road” captures the complexities and inequities of global work and the way peoples’ lives hinge upon the price of cotton and the price of labor. “Cotton Road” is a film about the men and women who do the work we never see, but it is also about globalization itself, the web of manufacturing and labor that makes possible warehouses full of cheap goods that are predictably delivered to our neighborhood store shelves every day.

We are connected to one another through the act of consumption, yet we remain estranged from the very processes of production and the people who make our things. As essayist Alain De Botton ruminates in “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”, “We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.” “Cotton Road” gives viewers a way to travel, through the filmmaker’s lens as if it is their own, into factory dorm rooms and country towns to begin to make sense of our connectedness through the things we consume.