Adelaide Film Festival review: She
This documentary by Italian filmmaker and anthropologist Parsifal Reparato unpacks the gendered labour of our global supply chain.
The world runs on the labour of women, the hands that feed, provide and package our modern-day privileges. She (2025), directed by Italian filmmaker and anthropologist Parsifal Reparato, uses several documentary styles to tell this story including observation, interviews and stylised re-creations. She focuses on a Vietnamese electronic factory in the Bac Ninh province, and the women behind this global supply chain. The documentary delivers an intimate yet political critique of this often-invisible labour.
The film starts with a faraway, still shot of a family eating dinner, accompanied by the quiet hum of the night. A mother videocalls her daughter, someone she hasn’t seen in person for a long time.
She doesn’t follow just one story, however. It presents fragments of life centred around this factory, the women and their families, how they live, and how men experience this same environment.
The film alternates between the site of the factory and wide shots of the surrounding homes and businesses, a visual reminder of how work and domestic life are tightly bound. She also uses more intimate, handheld shots, which focus on staged conversations between some of the women, using a local hairdresser to elicit some of these stories.
Throughout the film, we return to footage of a woman getting her hair done at a local hairdresser, where she speaks and jokes about her life as a factory worker and her connection to her family. Only her smile is visible, a smile that is in stark contrast to the different hardships she describes.
Interestingly, the faces of the women in She remain largely unseen throughout the film. The first fully visible face we see is that of a pink-haired hairdresser, a woman who openly defies this oppressive system. She is a woman who has quit the factory and bravely started her own businesses. She declares “With courage, anything can be done” – a personal motto as well as a political statement.
Going into this film, I expected a somewhat didactic lesson about capitalism and working-class labour. Yet the most striking elements of Reparato’s film reveal how patriarchal power systems are embedded in every aspect of these women’s lives.
The women in She must work to provide for their family, giving up their health and time with loved ones. This is contrasted throughout by how men are shown to profit from this system; afforded the privilege of pleasure, they party, smoke and drink, while the women of the film carry out their selfless burden of labour.
Through stylised re-creations in a studio, the factory workers’ production line is recreated by the actual women who labour in these factories. These women reenact their working lives, which also affords them the opportunity to discuss their conditions openly – something impossible to do at their actual workplace. The film also exposes how patriarchal traditions are upheld not only by men, but also by the women themselves. For example, the line leader who often criticises these women or punishes them for their work, defends the companies that use their cheap labour. A microcosm of larger social and cultural values, the factory shows us how Vietnamese women are pressured and controlled within workplace hierarchies.
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The story eventually circles back to the film’s opening, reflecting on how generations of women inherit histories of exploitive labour, shaped by global economic forces and patriarchal, gendered norms. In centring on the lives of these Vietnamese women, She doesn’t just observe factory labour, however. It reveals the humanity beneath it, exposing a system that is built on erasing female identities. Hauntingly intimate, yet humanising, She is a film that lingers – and hopefully reveals the realities of the global supply chains we rely upon.
She screens again on Friday October 24, 11am, Palace Nova Eastend as part of the Adelaide Film Festival
This review was provided by the ‘2025 Emerging Screen Critics Program’ – a Screen Studies collaboration between the Adelaide Film Festival and UniSA Creative, with the participation of students and mentors from the University of South Australia, the University of Adelaide and Flinders University. Supported by InReview.