Documentary Screening: Collective Threads, Collective Rights

Documentary Screening: Collective Threads, Collective Rights

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About the Film

Set on the island of Sri Lanka, shaped by Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial rule, Collective Threads, Collective Rights offers a rare, worker-led perspective that moves beyond the familiar language of “audits” or “sustainability.” Through their everyday realities and aspirations, workers across garment factories and other informal sectors define what Decent Work (SDG 8) means on the ground.

You will:

• 👂 Hear from Mani, Priya, Surya and Pushpa as they navigate life between rural villages and factory zones
• 🌱 Discover how civil-society networks and trade unions foster transnational solidarity in a country marked by genocide and economic and political collapse

Building on these individual accounts, the film shows how Sri Lanka’s colonial and post-war histories continue to shape global supply chains. In doing so, we also raise the question of how to prevent the Global South from being reduced to a tick-box and calls for a more grounded, worker-led forms of cooperation.

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About the Directors:

• Karthika Nadarajah - PhD researcher at Radboud University and volunteer with comdu.it Deutschland, a diaspora think-tank on sustainable development
• Keerthana Kuperan - Public-sector auditor and researcher specialising in global supply chain accountability

As researchers from the Tamil Sri Lankan diaspora (one Dutch-born, one Germany-born), we set out to show how workers in Sri Lanka define dignity and survival on their own terms. Grounded in a year of visual-anthropological fieldwork, Collective Threads, Collective Rights blends heavy themes with moments of humour and resilience, bringing worker and trade-union voices to European audiences in an authentic way.

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After screenings in Berlin, Utrecht, Zurich, London, and Cologne, the film now comes to Nijmegen. We warmly invite researchers, activists, and practitioners to join the conversation.

🎟 Entry is free

📧 For questions about the event, please e-mail karthika@comdu.it.

See you there,

Karthika & Keerthana

Trailer