Independent film. Cert: U. 78 mins, dir: Nick & Marc Francis www.blackgoldmovie.com
This
well-constructed but sometimes woolly documentary is a call to arms for
fair trade in the coffee industry. By following the often vain attempts
of Tadesse Meskela, general manager of a coffee producers’ co-operative
in Ethiopia, to get a better price for the coffee that his farmers
produce, the film convincingly conveys the iniquity of an $80billion
(£40bn) a year industry that produces so little income for those who
grow the beans that many of them struggle even to stay alive.
There
are poignant scenes of hard-working farmers living 15 to a room with
their families, lacking the means to send their children to school, or
forced to seek food aid for their malnourished offspring.
This
is not a relentlessly gloomy film, however, and it gets its message
across without preaching, partly because there is no narration and the
people it features are able to make the case for fairer trade on their
own.
Where it falls down is in pinpointing the causes. While
there is a suggestion that unseen middlemen, WTO rules, corporate greed
and the dominance of the coffee bean markets in New York and London are
to blame, this is never made specific. No breakdown is given of how
coffee profits are made and who is taking more than their fair share.
Without this data, the film goes for the heart of the viewer rather
than the head. With more precision it could have targeted both.
Peter Mason
