Plot Summary:A Documentary Film\n\nYield is an ethnographic inquiry done over a period of five years, documenting the lives of nine children living in dire Third World conditions. Stonecutters April, Ariel, and Rommel are siblings living off selling rocks they hack off a menacing mountain. Jomar scours the ocean silt for gold. Edralen and Jason tend to and transport agricultural products. With the addition of Alex and Glady Mae, both born with hydrocephalus; and Essam, a child warrior-the definition of labor is expounded to include another meaning: labor as part of the creation and eventual decline of life.\n\nYield does away with the introductions. Toil is translated as an algorithm of nameless faces, actions and spaces. The reduction of distinct narratives puts the weight not on the individuals represented per se but on the relations of the powerless. This is the search for survival up the peak down to the depths of the sea, because the child laborers could not compete/should not be in the center. This is the vertical growth of produce and its horizontal movement as it seeks market, the end that the child farmers/mules never see as they are only the cheap channel for production and distribution. This is the status quo unto which the children are born into, an unyielding state of affairs wherein they thrive.\n\nIt is a self-reflexive study on the inherent dilemma of representation as manipulation in documentary film. In belaboring child labor for an extended period, representing the exploited, itself, is exploitation. Yield is an attempt to address this impasse, stripping the gaze off its fetishization of poverty. The brutal editing does not linger to capture drama. It forges on in its brisk parade of shots, seeking answer in the shuffling and reshuffling of the pattern of lack, as it seeks solace in the suture of youth struggles. And as if in apology for representing the vulnerability of the exploited, it meanders time and again-gazing a little longer at greens growing or a healed child swimming against the river current-to find breaks on the solid wall of imagery that renders perceptible a system that has and will never yield, hoping perhaps to find a crack unto which it can whisper silent prayers for the dear and damned.
