Watch Black Gold
Becca Frankel 26 February 2008, 1:01 PM
Black Gold is a gem of a campaigning documentary. The film adheres to a traditional economic anthropological structure - we follow coffee through production, distribution and consumption, meeting great characters along the way, including Fairtrade deal brokers, and multinational coffee buyers. There are also more subtle juxtapositions between people at different end of the life cycle of coffee, such as the women harvesting the crop by hand, and the Batista's competing to make gourmet coffee in the world championships. This is exactly the kind of documentary that talks to an audience wider than environmentalists and idealists, because coffee is such an accessible way into the issues surround globalisation.
The film was directed by passionately driven brothers Nick and Marc Francis, who fought through the whole planning and production process of the film they wanted to make funding. This came from a variety of sources, including Screen South and significantly BritDoc. It's been shown on More 4 tonight, to coincide with Fair Trade Week, through the clause in BritDoc's funding which allows Channel 4 to broadcast funded documentaries after they have done the festival circuit, (and in this case worldwide theatrical distribution). It's similar in aspiration to Emily James' The Luckiest Nut in the World animated documentary, also exec-ed by Christo Hird, founder of Fulcrum TV. Another recent, but more poetic documentary, about the lack of compassion in food production, distribution and consumption is the hypnotic Our Daily Bread.
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