Sweet Crude trailer 2009
Sweet Crude is a documentary film about the Niger Delta of Nigeria — the humanitarian and environmental devastation there in the wake of 50 years of unregulated oil extraction, the history of non-violent protest by Niger Deltans demanding control of their own resources and the emergence of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).

Sweet Crude Documentary Synopsis

In the summer of 2008, militants from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) declared an “oil war” in Nigeria. This was one of the biggest spikes yet on a radar screen dotted with conflict and tragedy. The documentary film Sweet Crude is the story of the Niger Delta; of the villagers of Oporoza, headquarters of the insurgency; and of members of the armed resistance who, in the three years since the filmmakers met them as college students, became the young men of MEND.

The Niger Delta is a powder keg. Escalating unrest and kidnappings by militants have shut down as much as 40% of oil production in the region. The Nigerian government continues to make and break a long string of promises to resolve the crisis. The international community is standing by while impending war looms.

Meanwhile, the people of the Delta are suffering as they have for half a century. Billions of dollars of crude oil are pumped out from beneath their feet, while they live in desperate poverty – without means of livelihood in a decimated environment. Oil spills, dredging and acid rain from gas flaring have destroyed habitats, killed the fish population, fouled the soil and poisoned the villagers. Their villages lack potable water, sanitation, infrastructure, healthcare and schools. Job prospects are bleak and people die young.

There is a long legacy of non-violent protest in the Delta. But it has consistently been met by the Nigerian government with violence – not only against individuals who spoke out, but against entire communities. By late 2005, the people had had enough. A new armed resistance, MEND, emerged. They began kidnapping oil workers to bring international attention to the crisis and in the years since, the region has become increasingly unstable. Yet they have repeatedly stated their desire to negotiate. In this moment, there is an opportunity to tip the scales toward peace.

Sweet Crude is about the humanitarian, environmental and economic devastation in the wake of 50 years of oil extraction – and the opportunity for the international community to do something. The film also raises broader issues of oil politics, mass media agendas and the role of independent journalists in getting the truth out.

POSTSCRIPT
The Sweet Crude film crew made four trips to the Niger Delta. In April 2008, while traveling by boat on their way to
a shoot, they and their Nigerian colleague were detained by the Nigerian military. They were imprisoned for a week
and finally released after an international outcry, including a letter to the Nigerian president signed by 14 U.S.
lawmakers. The footage from that last trip remains in the hands of the Nigerian government.

CRUDE – Official Trailer

Three years in the making, this cinéma-vérité feature from acclaimed filmmaker Joe Berlinger is the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet. An inside look at the infamous $27 billion Amazon Chernobyl case, CRUDE is a real-life high stakes legal drama set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, the media, multinational corporate power, and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures. Presenting a complex situation from multiple viewpoints, the film subverts the conventions of advocacy filmmaking as it examines a complicated situation from all angles while bringing an important story of environmental peril and human suffering into focus.

A Combined Gallery of images from Sweet Crude and Crude

Check NetFlix for availability.

Those Who Dance
about Shell Oil Company’s crimes in Ireland and Nigeria, and the people who fight back. Shot & edited by Mayyasa Al-Malazi with original music by Camilla Cancantata Additional Footage by Paul Brewster & William Dick of Wavebob, Glenn Ellis, Michael Flanagan & Friends of the Earth London Microscopic Images, Shelley Burgoyne Nancy Elan, violin Ippy Femonic. electric bass Tim Hand, technical assistance Voice Over, Isobel McKenna
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6183325813995181497#

Links to Related Oil/Energy Documentaries and Resources:
Sweet Crude Documentary Website
Crude Documentary website
Crude Impact Documentary
The end of Surburbia
A Crude awakening – The Oil Crash
Who Killed the Electric Car
Platform London

* Billions of people around the globe go to bed hungry and struggle to find nourishment. Why is it that communities with the most resources are often impoverished? How is food processed, who controls what we eat, and what if anything can we do to make change?

Here are some documentaries addressing issues of food and poverty across the globe.

The End of Poverty – This slow-paced documentary is highly reommended. Watch with a group and discuss!
(full version interspaced with advertising)

Synopsis

The End of Poverty? is a daring, thought-provoking and very timely documentary by award-winning filmmaker, Philippe Diaz, revealing that poverty is not an accident. It began with military conquest, slavery and colonization that resulted in the seizure of land, minerals and forced labor. Today, global poverty has reached new levels because of unfair debt, trade and tax policies — in other words, wealthy countries exploiting the weaknesses of poor, developing countries.

The End of Poverty? asks why today 20% of the planet’s population uses 80% of its resources and consumes 30% more than the planet can regenerate?

The film has been selected to over 25 international film festivals and will be released in theatres in November 2009. Directed by Philippe Diaz, produced by Cinema Libre Studio with the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 104mins, 2008, USA, documentary in English, Spanish, French with English Subtitles.

http://www.theendofpoverty.com/

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DIRT! the Movie – available on Netflix
Film Trailer

Summary

DIRT! The Movie, tells the amazing and little known story of the relationship between humans and living dirt.
Why Dirt?

“Floods, drought, climate change, even war are all directly related to the way we are treating dirt.”

DIRT! The Movie–directed and produced by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow–takes you inside the wonders of the soil. It tells the story of Earth’s most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility–from its miraculous beginning to its crippling degradation.

The opening scenes of the film dive into the wonderment of the soil. Made from the same elements as the stars, plants and animals, and us, “dirt is very much alive.” Though, in modern industrial pursuits and clamor for both profit and natural resources, our human connection to and respect for soil has been disrupted. “Drought, climate change, even war are all directly related to the way we are treating dirt.”

DIRT! the Movie–narrated by Jaime Lee Curtis–brings to life the environmental, economic, social and political impact that the soil has. It shares the stories of experts from all over the world who study and are able to harness the beauty and power of a respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with soil.

DIRT! the Movie is simply a movie about dirt. The real change lies in our notion of what dirt is. The movie teaches us: “When humans arrived 2 million years ago, everything changed for dirt. And from that moment on, the fate of dirt and humans has been intimately linked.” But more than the film and the lessons that it teaches, DIRT the Movie is a call to action.

“The only remedy for disconnecting people from the natural world is connecting them to it again.”

What we’ve destroyed, we can heal.

http://dirtthemovie.org/

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Food Inc.
Food Inc. Official Trailer

Synopsis

How much do we really know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families?
In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

http://www.foodincmovie.com/

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The Future of Food
About

The Future of Food has been a key tool in the American and international anti-GMO grassroots activist movements and played widely in the environmental and activist circuits since its release in 2004. The film is widely acknowledged for its role in educating voters and the subsequent success of passing Measure H in Mendocino County, California, one of the first local initiatives in the country to ban the planting of GMO crops. Indicative of its popularity, the Future of Food showed to a sold out audience of 1,500 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco in 2004, a benefit for Slow Food, where it was introduced by Alice Waters.

Trailer

http://www.thefutureoffood.com/

http://www.hulu.com/watch/67878/the-future-of-food (on HULU with ads)
http://www.thefutureoffood.com/onlinevideo.html (without ads)
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Waste=Food
Waste=Food – Full movie on Google Video
About Waste=Food

An inspiring documentary on the Cradle to Cradle design concept of the chemist Michael Braungart and the architect William McDonough. Winner of the Silver Dragon at the Beijing International Science Film Festival 2006. OUTLINE: Man is the only creature that produces landfills. Natural resources are being depleted on a rapid scale while production and consumption are rising in na­tions like China and India. The waste production world wide is enormous and if we do not do anything we will soon have turned all our resources into one big messy landfill. But there is hope. The German chemist, Michael Braungart, and the American designer-architect William McDonough are fundamentally changing the way we produce and build. If waste would become food for the biosphere or the technosphere (all the technical products we make), produc­tion and consumption could become beneficial for the planet. A design and production concept that they call Cradle to Cradle. A concept that is seen as the next industrial revolution. • Design every product in such a way that at the end of its lifecycle the component materials become a new resource. • Design buildings in such a way that they produce energy and become a friend to the environment. Large companies like Ford and Nike are working with McDonough and Braun­gart to change their production facilities and their products. They realize that economically seen waste is destruction of capital. You make something with no value. Based on their ideas the Chinese government is working towards a circular economy where Waste = Food. An amazing story that will definitely change your way of thinking about production and consumption. Director Rob van Hattum Research Gijs Meijer Swantee Production Karin Spiegel en Madeleine Somer Editors in Chief Doke Romeijn en Frank Wiering

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FRESH

FRESH Synopsis

FRESH celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Each has witnessed the rapid transformation of our agriculture into an industrial model, and confronted the consequences: food contamination, environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, and morbid obesity. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food and our planet.

Among several main characters, FRESH features urban farmer and activist, Will Allen, the recipient of MacArthur’s 2008 Genius Award; sustainable farmer and entrepreneur, Joel Salatin, made famous by Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma; and supermarket owner, David Ball, challenging our Wal-Mart dominated economy.

http://www.freshthemovie.com/

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KING CORN

King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop
that drives our fast-food nation.
In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the
heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically
modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s mostproductive,
most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile
of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat—and how
we farm. http://www.kingcorn.net/

*Causes of Poverty – Poverty Facts and Stats

Edward Said describes Orientalism as “the manufacture of the other” mainly done for purposes of domination. He locates Orientalism within the history of military and ideological imperialism . It is an attempt to acquire information in a way that is neither innocent nor objective, but driven by special interests (such as the control of resources like oil.)

The wanton, irresponsible actions of oil companies, governments and media regarding the Niger Delta, are classic examples of domination for purposes of exploitation. Although the communities of the Niger Delta are not in “the Orient,” Said’s theories still apply.

Wherever people are fetishisized and considered less than human, marginalization, rape and theft are easily carried out.

I created this short clip in memory of the exploited people of the oil rich Niger Delta in Nigeria, with music from Fela Anikulapo Kuti. This was inspired by “The Next Gulf: London, Washington and Oil Conflict in Nigeria” a terrific book by British authors,Andrew Rowell, James Marriott, Lorne Stockman at Platform.