MOVIE • 2019

Green Warriors: Indonesia, The World’s Most Polluted River

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Green Warriors Indonesia: The World’s Most Polluted River is a film by Martin Boudot (2018) that investigates the impacts of the pollution of the Citarum River in Indonesia. The film highlights the implications of textile factories’ poor wastewater treatment practices on public health, and shows how these are partly driven by the consequences of the unequal power dynamics between the factories and the multinational garment companies based in the ‘West’. Boudot challenges the viewer to increase consumer demand for eco-label garments as a way to try and address this. This analysis finds that in doing so, the film foregrounds investigation undertaken by the European reporters at the expense of contributions of local research and activism, rendering it archetypal of the “white saviour industrial complex” (Cole, 2012).