Imagine: you've spent the last 33 years working at the Cannon Mills textile plant in Kannapolis, N.C., supporting your family by sewing washcloths. With the birth of new technologies, work has become streamlined, but you've always been confident that your job is safe. After all, the company built this town and has supported it in the many decades since. But in 2003, imagine the plant announces that you are being laid off, along with close to 8,000 others, and that it is moving to China. In the months since, the town dries up and you still don't find new work. You've been left with no health insurance, can no longer afford to take your prescription drugs and are within months of declaring bankruptcy.

This is America?

This is one of many such scenarios found in, the new, hour-long documentary American Jobs. The film was screened in Pollack Auditorium Thursday evening as part of The Art of the Political Documentary program presented by Brandeis' Film Studies Program, Journalism Program and Sociology Department.

Traveling across the continent from North Carolina to New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, Orlando, Denver and even Juarez, Mexico, the film explores the most immediate domestic consequences of the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries in the textile and technology sectors. It presents an unusually humanized account of these trends, as well as specific economic tools and agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The film was introduced by first-time director Greg Spotts, a former producer for MTV and the LA Galaxy soccer team and a co-creator of the Short List Music Prize. He explained that he quit his job a year ago to make the movie, hoping to amplify the voices of America's unheard: the unemployed. Following his travels to 19 cities and towns over the course of five months the film gives a non-partisan account of the plights of his subjects through interviews with fired employees, local officials and several U.S. Congressmen.

Spotts' film begins by defining its subject in simple terms. He interviews a classroom of high school students, asking them where their clothes were manufactured predictably, no one answered United States. We then segue to Los Angeles, where sweatshop garment workers are on strike, then to Kannapolis as well as other locations. While these stays are seemingly brief, the interview format brings an entirely personalized depth to the stories, extracting empathy convincingly enough as to not garner cynicism. By placing these accounts as the basis for his eventual critique of NAFTA (and the proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement [CAFTA]), the film's arguments are both credible and believable. Essentially, we see an argument for economic reevaluation drenched neither in policy nor ideology; Spotts' account is entirely humanized.

When Spotts takes us to Juarez, Mexico , a shantytown near the American border created to support a local maquilladora, we witness the abuses of workers' rights allowed by the American-owners. We see community members protesting against the inaction of authorities following repeated abductions of woman workers. We see the failure of the government and the factory to create the necessary infrastructure to support the town there is no sewage, no telephones or electricity, no police. And then we learn that once owners can find cheaper labor, they can leave without penalty, stranding communities like Juarez.

The director brings us back to our own country, where we learn that American jobs, as well are being lost in sectors requiring high levels of education. We see 50,000 Boeing employees fired after 9/11 despite a $5 billion government hand-out, and then the eventual outsourcing of those jobs to Russia and Japan. Spotts then visits laid-off information technology workers in Orlando, FL, discussing how American companies can take advantage of visa laws to hire Indian workers, even having them trained by the employees they will eventually replace. Amazingly, the Indians are still training in Orlando over a year after they are hired, yet are paid as low as 1/16 the salaries of their predecessors.

Ultimately, American Jobs ends on a positive note, highlighting both congressional and grassroots efforts to regulate outsourcing. But it leaves us feeling that our role in the world economy has had a significant effect on the welfare of many Americans, perhaps even upon our national pride. While the self-funded film has more of an agenda than Spotts will admit, it's an admirable project for the first-time director, particularly during a year in which the political documentary has found such resurging interest.