Bangladesh won’t let its citizens see a film about its deadliest industrial accident|#Film
The movie centers on a real-life Rana Plaza survivor, Reshma Begum. (AP Photo/Hasan Raza)
Movies can elicit strong emotions when they
recreate traumatic events, and in Bangladesh, perhaps no subject matter
more so than the deadly 2013 factory collapse at Rana Plaza in
Bangladesh, which killed 1,134 and shook up the nation’s rapidly growing garment industry.
Now, a court in Bangladesh has declared a
six-month ban on a movie that retells the story of a woman trapped in
the rubble for 17 days, purportedly because of the graphic carnage it
depicts. The decision, which applies to screenings both in Bangladesh
and overseas, comes in response to a writ petition by a labor group that argues the movie, titled The Rana Plaza, would “negatively portray”
Bangladesh’s $25-billion apparel industry. Apparently the group is
concerned that showing a factory riddled with safety hazards collapsing
and killing more than 1,100 people would not arouse positive emotions
for Bangladesh’s 4 million or more garment workers.
The court had previously instructed Nazrul Islam
Khan, the movie’s director, to remove certain scenes that censors
identified as “too cruel,” he told UCAnews, a Catholic news site, which Khan says he did.
“The film tried to portray unpleasant truths
about the industry, not to harm its reputation, but to promote public
awareness,” Khan said. He intends to appeal the ban, and called it a
“conspiracy.”
Bangladesh undoubtedly has much to protect in its garment industry. It accounts for nearly 82% of the country’s exports, and while its workers are notoriously underpaid, it has also been a path out of complete poverty for many. It’s so important to Bangladesh that the country is working to double its garment exports by 2021.
The story depicted in the movie centers on Reshma
Begum, a real-life survivor of Rana Plaza who was caught in the
building’s ruins for more than two weeks. She survived on four packs of
cookies and water she luckily had with her.
After her rescue, she described her horrific ordeal. “Another person, a man, was near me. He asked for water. I could not help him. He died. He screamed, ‘Save me,’ but he died,” she said. “I will not work in a garment factory again.”
Reshma Begum went on to get a job as a “public area ambassador” at a five-star Westin in Dhaka afterward. The government arranged the position.
She has married her boyfriend since, and the
movie also portrays their love affair, in keeping with the romantic
style of Bangladeshi cinema. (Its Dhaka-centered film industry is known
as Dhallywood.)
“The Rana Plaza is also about Reshma’s
love story, which tries to raise awareness about the life of the
country’s millions of woman garment workers,” Khan told Agence France Press.
Women actually account for 80% of the garment
industry’s workforce. And though they may identify in many respects with
Reshma Begum and her story, it appears their industry isn’t keen to
show them in graphic detail what it was like for her to be trapped in a
collapsed factory for 17 days.
New NASA research points to an “unavoidable” rise of several feet for the Earth’s oceans
It's inevitable.(Flickr user go_greener_oz)
New satellite research from NASA shows that not
only are global sea levels rising quickly, but they could rise even more
drastically than previous reports estimated. According to the US space agency,
seas around the world have risen an average of three inches (7.6 cm)
since 1992, and as much as nine inches (23 cm) in certain places.
“It’s pretty certain we are locked into at least 3 feet of sea level rise, and probably more,” said Steve Nerem, head of NASA’s Sea Level Change Team. “But we don’t know whether it will happen within a century or somewhat longer.”
Sea levels are rising for three main reasons: The
melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the melting of
mountain glaciers, and the expansion of oceans as they absorb heat and
become warmer. All three causes can be directly attributed to global
warming.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) said in 2013 that global sea levels were likely to
rise between one and three feet over the next century. But after
studying 23 years of satellite information—the entire record of data
available—NASA warns that those estimates are probably too conservative.
“The data shows that sea level is rising faster than it was 50 years ago, and it’s very likely to get worse in the future,” Nerem said. The question now, NASA says, is “how that range might shift upward.”
This NASA visualization shows how much the Greenland ice sheet has melted over the last decade:
“The Greenland ice sheet, covering 660,000 square
miles—nearly the area of Alaska—shed an average of 303 gigatons of ice a
year over the past decade, according to satellite measurements,” NASA
said. “The Antarctic ice sheet, covering 5.4 million square miles—larger
than the United States and India combined—has lost an average of 118
gigatons a year.
All that melted ice has to go somewhere.
Rapidly increasing sea levels could have drastic
consequences for human populations, especially the hundreds of millions
of people who live in coastal areas or on islands. Coastlines will
erode, storm surges will rise, and some areas could become completely
uninhabitable.
Here’s what Miami, Florida would look like after just a meter of sea level rise, according to a visualization created by Andrew David Thaler (@SFriedScientist), a marine science PhD and ocean-science website editor:
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