Crude

Prediction

Timeless (learn more)

Festival Year

2009 (click here to see all competition films from this year)

Category

Documentary Competition

Non-Cast Credits

Joe Berlinger, Liesl Copland, Jon Kamen, Joe Berlinger, Michael Bonfiglio, J.R. DeLeon, Richard Stratton, Daniel Luciano, Danielle Pelland, Stuart Zweibel, Juan Diego Pérez, Pocho Alvarez, Joe Berlinger, Michael Bonfiglio, Alyse Ardell Spiegel, Michael Bonfiglio

Description

Can 30,000 plaintiffs from five Indigenous Ecuadoran tribes find justice from Chevron, one of the world's largest oil producers? Who is responsible for the unconscionable dumping of 18 billion gallons of toxic oil waste in the Ecuadoran Amazon, poisoning the most biodiverse place on the planet? Filmmaker Joe Berlinger's latest documentary picks up the thread of the infamous ""Amazon Chernobyl"" case, a 13-year-old battle between communities nearly destroyed by oil drilling and development and one of the biggest companies on earth. In a sophisticated take on the classic David and Goliath story, Berlinger took three years to craft a cinema portrait centering on the charismatic lawyers in the U.S. and Ecuador who have doggedly pursued the case against all of the forces a corporation can bring into courts of law. Though the Ecuadorans and their perspective receive the lion's share of screen time, the film makes a concerted effort to show the case from all sides: from the scientists and lawyers employed by Chevron, to Ecuadoran judges, to celebrity activists and humanitarian organizers, to the role of the media, to the dramatic intervention of Rafael Correa himself, the first Ecuadoran president to sympathize with the Indigenous perspective. In a tale that spans the globe, Crude looks beyond compassion for the disenfranchised and the corruption of those in power to ask how justice itself is being defined in the twenty-first century.

Reviewer

Cara Mertes (see other films reviewed by the same reviewer)

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