NEW YORK - The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival runs June 9 - 23 at Lincoln Center (www.hrw.org/iff for complete schedule) with 26 films and videos from 20 countries. These features and documentaries address, among other things, the rights of children and the horrors of war and its aftermath including more than one front-line report from Iraq.

Mardi Gras: Made in China is a straightforward documentary that tackles corporate globalization by following the life cycle of a string of Mardi Gras beads from the Tai Kuen Bead Factory in Fujian, China, where they are made, to the streets of New Orleans, where they adorn someone’s neck before ending up in the gutter.

At one end of the cycle are teenage women working 14 to 16 hours a day; at the other end, 20-something women drinking 14 to 16 hours a day. The teenagers expose themselves to harsh working conditions for low pay; the 20-somethings expose themselves to inebriated men for trinkets.

Many of the women in the first group throw away their dreams for a better life to work in the bead factory and send money home to their families in the provinces. Those in the second group throw away the beads and head home after the party is over. Filmmaker David Redmon shows each group images of the other and gets reactions.

But the bulk of the film is spent in the factory and dormitories where Redmon was given full access to the workers who each turn out nearly 8,000 pounds of beads a day, earning the owners an annual profit of $1.5 million.

Interviews with manager Roger Wong reveal a man proud of the operation and candid about his management philosophy. About 95% of employees are women because “it’s easier to control the lady workers.” He affects this control with bonuses and punishment- but mostly punishment. Five percent of pay docked for not meeting the quota; one week’s pay ($12.50) docked for talking on the job; one month’s pay docked if a member of the opposite sex is found in the dormitory.

Reports of deplorable working conditions in China are nothing new. But the 16-hour workdays and 6- and 7-day workweeks illustrate the pitfalls of trying develop a broad consumer market in China.

“Where people work longest and with least leisure, they buy the fewest goods. No towns were so poor as those … where the people, from children up, worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day.”

That was Henry Ford in 1926. He understood that people buy things when they have time off to use them. Like those folks who go to Mardi Gras.