Crude

Crude is a thoughtful, heartbreaking new film directed by Joe Berlinger, whose previous films, Brother’s Keeper, Some Kind of Monster, and Paradise Lost were classical cinema verité. In Crude, built around a class-action lawsuit filed in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador, Berlinger stays essentially true to his verité roots as a storyteller. He takes us on an investigation that systematically reveals the unrelenting nature of economic exploitation and the devastation in terms of human and environmental suffering unleashed upon an undeveloped and unprotected people.

From the start the film sets the two sides, represented by Pablo Fajardo, the plaintiff’s attorney, and Adolfo Callejas, representing Chevron, against each other. The legal battle provides a dramatic frame that allows Berlinger to document the story in thorough and sometimes unexpected ways. A central force is Steven Donziger, a consultant for the plaintiffs since 1993, who tirelessly pushes the case forward in every imaginable way. During a strategy session with ordinary Ecuadorians who hope to speak at a shareholders' meeting in San Francisco, Berlinger shows us what many other filmmakers would have left in the editing room – Donziger carefully and obsessively seeming to craft every word that will be spoken the next day.

Crude has a visual beauty that is underscored by the remarkable contrast between the physical paradise of the land and people and the grotesque destruction left behind by Texaco-Chevron. Hundreds of open oil pits line the countryside, intentionally created to dump poisonous waste, which then seeps into the ground and runs off into the water stream. Children with skin rashes and cancerous tumors have become the norm – one woman must find $500 every two weeks to treat the cancer inside her child. When she buys chickens to raise for profit, they drink the poisonous water in the stream and die. A large white duck lies on its back, immobile, its feet jerking in sickening spasms.  A nurse holds a twenty-day-old baby suffering from debilitating rashes; three out of every four children she sees have this kind of sickness.

As events push toward what at first seems hopeless, the world seems to awaken. The progressive economist Rafael Correa is elected president of Ecuador and becomes the first president to visit the contaminated land. Vanity Fair picks up on the story and features Fajardo in a major environmental article. Trudie Styler, cofounder of the Rainforest Foundation with her husband Sting, comes to Ecuador and begins a slow healing process by arranging for clean-water collection units to be installed. The beautiful and authentic soundtrack by Wendy Blackstone (El Salvador: Another Vietnam, American Experience) is transformed by the end into Message in a Bottle (SOS), performed by the Police in a live New York City performance to benefit the environment.

Despite the ability of Chevron to wear down the severely underfinanced plaintiffs Crude is a hopeful and beautiful film with the power to open our eyes to environmental destruction and open our hearts to the plight of indigenous people.

                                    Thomas W. Campbell