Source: Kelowna.com
The environmental documentary has almost become a genre of its own: a downbeat catalogue of bad news, dirty water, foul air, sick people and secretive energy companies, usually tied up in a message that says it's not too late, although it sure looks like it is. They're persuasive and important, not to say vital.
Now along comes Joe Berlinger, a documentary-maker with a broad range of interests – he made both Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills – with Crude, an environmental documentary that is as much a legal thriller. The usual suspects are there; indeed, the water has rarely been dirtier or the energy company more secretive. But Berlinger creeps into the crevices and ambiguities of this particular disaster to find the intricate battles, bureaucratic roadblocks and not-quite-all-white knights who are fighting it.
The result is at once an infuriating, moving and fascinating story of a disaster in the Amazon rainforest that is poisoning natives and causing cancer in children – shots of a 20-day-old baby covered in a red rash brings tears to your eyes – that becomes a part of celebrity culture. At one stage, Trudie Styler (Mrs. Sting to you) becomes interested in the story, and she tours the Ecuadorean villages that are, in some cases, built right on top of the polluted soil left behind by oil exploration. "Try to use the word `Texaco' as much as possible," urges Steven Donziger, the American lawyer who's helping the natives fight the oil giant – since acquired by Chevron – that he blames for the pollution.
The power of celebrity is just part of Berlinger's story, which tells as balanced a tale as possible about a serpentine court case that has been going on for decades. Texaco, then Chevron, did massive oil exploration in Ecuador; the sludge is only part of the legacy. Pits of petroleum sit in the middle of the jungle, leaching into the water supply that runs past the villages of native people, the Cofan. "We had a clean jungle," one of them says, but today, it's a place of mourning, where mothers cry when they talk about the cancer in their teenage daughters or the children who have already died.
Donziger took on the case – and the American lawyers stand to make a lot of money if a settlement is ever reached – along with Pablo Fajardo, an Ecuadorean attorney who says he has an easier job than the Chevron lawyers because "they have to think much harder than me" to find an appropriate story. On the other side is Chevron, which says there's no pollution in the water, because the oil company cleaned up after itself – and if there is, it's as much the fault of Petroecuador, a consortium that did the drilling and exploration in partnership with Texaco.
Lawyers for both sides visit various sites in the jungle in the presence of a judge (and Berlinger's cameras), accusing each other of misrepresenting the facts; after all, who's to say which oil company is responsible for the black sludge beneath the villages or the water that smells like gasoline? At the same time, Donziger is carrying on a public-relations campaign, something necessary in a world overwhelmed with environmental bad news. When the Ecuador story gets into Vanity Fair magazine's Green Issue, it's a turning point.
There are several strands of story going on at once in Crude. Indeed, they've been going on since 1993, with no end in sight. The stakes are very high (a settlement of $27 billion is mentioned), judges come and go, lawyers are indicted for corruption, pollution is measured and measured again. The delays can only help the defendants. Back in the U.S., Chevron officials assure the cameras that everything is fine.
Crude opens with an elderly native woman talking about the damage that has occurred since "the company" came. She then sings a song that asks, "What will become of my people?" In a Hollywood courtroom drama, her hopeful face would be the closing image of a successful battle. In Crude, her sad face is the beginning.