Ethical Consumer interviews Black Gold film makers
Black Gold is the latest film in the genre recently identified by the Washington Post as "the supply chain movie". The documentary follows Tadesse Meskela, a representative of 74,000 struggling Ethiopian coffee growers, as he travels the world in an attempt to find buyers willing to pay a fair price.
We interviewed film makers Marc & Nick Francis for our May/June 2007 issue.
Q: How did you meet Tadesse Meskela? Why did you choose to feature his cooperative union in the film?
A: In our research we read about Tadesse and on our first trip to Addis Ababa in 2003 we interviewed him at length about the coffee industry. Towards the end of the interview he mentioned he was going to Europe, the US and Japan to meet buyers to sell his farmers coffee directly. Immediately we realised we had to follow his journey, and so for the next two years we filmed with him in Seattle, London and back in Ethiopia.
By focusing on Tadesse and his co-operative union we could create the direct link between consumers and producers. The Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union is also the largest in Ethiopia – it represents over 75,000 farmers.
Q: What did you want to achieve with Black Gold?
A: With any film you want to achieve many things, here are a few of them:
We wanted Black Gold to motivate us, as western consumers, to question some of our basic assumptions about our consumer lifestyle and its interaction with the rest of the world.
We wanted to urgently remind audiences that through just one cup of coffee, we are inextricably connected to the livelihoods of millions of people around the world who are struggling to survive, while corporations are earning record profits.
We also wanted the film to challenge the stereotypical portrayal of Africa, often characterised in the Western media by an overload of de-contextualised images depicting poverty and helplessness.
Crucially we wanted the audience to see that the current international trading system is enslaving millions of people and is urgently in need of radical reform. We wanted people to wake up and smell the coffee….
Q: What were some of the challenges you faced in making Black Gold?
A: One of our main challenges was funding the film. Initially we had to put our own resources into starting the project, because we had to capture what was happening in the coffee areas of Southern Ethiopia. Also the world trade talks were taking place in Mexico, and we couldn’t wait for funding applications or broadcasters to give us the green light.
Q: What was it like filming in so many locations globally?
A: Exhausting! There were so many variables all the time and everything was very unpredictable. Having said that, it helped us feel the story we were trying to tell. One minute we were in the New York Commodity exchange where billions of dollars are traded, and the next in Ethiopian coffee fields where farmers struggling to survive. That juxtaposition underlines the entire film.
Q: What didn’t get included in your film that you would have liked to?
A: We wanted to include interviews with all the major coffee multinationals: Kraft, Proctor & Gamble, Nestlé and Starbucks. But they all declined our invitations, which you could say, speaks volumes about transparency in the industry. In the case of Starbucks, they went on to publicly discredit the film when it was released.
Q: What has the audience response been so far?
A: We’ve been overwhelmed by the response internationally. Audiences have reacted in so many different ways. As soon as we premiered the film at the Sundance Film Festival we could sense the film was going to cause a reaction. The first person who asked a question at our Q&A wrote a cheque for $10,000 to complete a school featured in one of the scenes in the film. We heard that someone else divested $10,000 from Starbucks in protest at the their buying policies. People want to leave the cinema and do something, and we see that happening all the time now. For others it has changed their perception of Africa. In Black Gold, you see an Ethiopia that is lush and green, not a barren desert; a country that is rich in resources, with people, striving for change. This narrative is rarely given exposure in the news media.
See this film, and when you have, drink the coffee - we rate fairtrade coffees, and point you to the best Ethiopian brands on our online shopping guide www.ethiscore.org
Black Gold is now available on DVD.
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