BBC Four: How did the project start?
Thomas Balmès: The commissioning editor YLE in Finland, Iikka Vehkalahti, suggested I use my anthropological background to look at Nokia in the same way that I had previously made films about tribes in Kenya, Papua New Guinea and India. Because the corporation is such a big part of Finland - it makes up almost 70% of the stock market in Helsinki - they couldn't find a Finnish director who could take a neutral look at the company. So I accepted and the nightmare began...

BBC Four: It was hard to find the story?
TB: Yes. Nokia is the most cautious of the high-tech companies: every single person who works at Nokia has a contract with a non-disclosure clause that doesn't allow them to talk about their day-to-day work, even within their own family. On top of that, the Finns are not the most willing to be on camera - they are all very shy and have low self-esteem - the worst I have ever seen in my life. At the beginning, I thought about doing a film in the village of Nokia where the company started. It's divided between the workers, some of whom were communists and refused stocks in the 1980s, and the others who bought them. You now have a few thousand people who are either millionaires or don't get any dividends at all. In any other country you would imagine this would create conflict and jealously, but that's not the case here. They all live in the same houses and drive the same cars. It's absolutely fascinating but nobody's willing to talk about it.

BBC Four: How did you find Hanna, the Finnish ethical consultant?
TB: I spent 18 months filming boring Nokia meetings all over the world before I met her. A French director at Nokia told me about this woman who for the last five years had been refusing incentives offered to the management, now worth a lot of money. She was just starting to push the Nokia management to take a new position with ethical issues (before, she had been in charge of the environmental issues). I found it very interesting because it touched on the issue - can you be a capitalist and be ethical at the same time? I was also lucky to be in at the beginning of a process - Hanna was about to do Nokia's first ever ethical assessment. When I arrived in China no one really knew who I was or what I was doing and this confusion allowed me to film.

BBC Four: A lot of films about this subject seem content only to focus on the plight of the workers. Were you wary of that?
TB: I don't want to make films about issues that oblige me to be too simplistic. I do have testimonies from some of the workers in the film, and Chinese factories are much worse than European ones. But I don't point this out too much, because to me this isn't the focus of the film. I even thought about only filming from the side of the factory managers because it's not a film that is trying to describe workers' conditions. I wanted it to be about more than us feeling bad about how workers were being exploited. It questions how much you can hold on to your ideals. Finland is the most advanced country in the world in terms of social welfare and equality. Nevertheless, when the biggest company in the country needs to be global then they have to play the game the American way. That's the main point of the film - how can you resist? Especially when you are being traded every day in New York, 90% of the ownership is based in the United States, and they keep you on the leash and don't allow you big margins on how you should behave.

BBC Four: From a British perspective it's entertaining to see the English factory manager, Richard. He's funny, and brutally honest...
TB: He is the star of the film for me because he is very cynical. The way he speaks about the workers is the key to what makes the film work. He felt so self-confident about everything: about the minimum wages and all that. But he only thought in terms of comparing the factory to other Chinese factories, rather than thinking about the factory itself, which doesn't have good conditions.

BBC Four: Were you shocked by anything you saw in China?
TB: The factory really looked like a camp: they sleep in the factory, they work in the factory. That's common in China, but it was definitely close to how you'd think of a jail. Apart from that I was shocked by how Richard, the British factory manager, talked about the workers and by the kind of non-climax you have at the end. You expect there to be a major confrontation, which is where you realise the weakness and efficiency of what's going on behind all these changes. It's much more about being able to say we've done an assessment rather than anything else.

BBC Four: Nokia seem aware of that though. As one of the managers says in the film, are they hiring ethical consultants because they want to change the world, or to mention it in a marketing brochure?
TB: I'm glad that we raised that question right at the beginning and it's something which I think the film answers quite well. In the end, Hanna left Nokia to become a nurse - she decided to act not globally, but locally in her village hospital. I think the fact that she did that is quite revealing.

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