FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead

Chevron vs the people in Crude.

The implosion of the US housing bubble last year, and the subsequent fallout, is the subject of several documentaries at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival (October 1-16). Part of a finance related strand entitled “Follow The Money,” the docs try to untangle the complex financial web behind the subprime disaster that led to bank collapses, an $800 billion federal bailout package and hardship for the families who found themselves unable to keep up with payments on their houses.

One strikingly consistent theme in these money docs is how quickly the rot sets in when these financial products go bad. This is not just about the pain of individuals or families; when a neighbourhood begins experiencing a spate of foreclosures, the disintegration spreads quickly.

American Casino maps the mortgage meltdown from the Wall Street financiers, following the subprime ‘river of money’ to a black neighbourhood in Baltimore where a social worker, a teacher and a minister are all in the process of losing their homes. It moves from the sad to the surreal as we follow a local government worker to a foreclosure wasteland in suburban Riverside, California, where abandoned houses are targeted for grow-ops and crack dens. Stagnant swimming pools, filled with playground equipment and household debris, have become breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

The 65-minute We All Fall Down, written and produced by former financier Kevin Stocklin, while more straightforward television fare, is similar in its treatment of the subject. It lays out in authoritative and accessible terms the origins of the problem and viewers meet the low-income families hurt when the house of cards collapsed.

As the title suggests, Around the World With Joseph Stiglitz: Perils and Promises of Globalization, expands the focus. The renowned economist parallels the decrepit state of his once thriving hometown of Gary, Indiana, where the demise of the steel industry was accompanied by a 40 percent population exodus to other places around the world negatively impacted by free-market globalization’s “race to the bottom.” The wide-ranging doc highlights the problems with western agricultural subsidies from the point of view of Indian farmers and looks at how the “natural resources curse” impoverishes the lives of indigenous people whether they are Kalahari Bushmen or Ecuadorean farmers. Stiglitz’s prescription includes better regulation of markets and a level playing field in the marketplace. The doc is theoretical, so may prove too dry for some with all its talking heads. Stiglitz is also a little too in awe of China’s economic model for my liking, but this is a stimulating essay on the world in which we live.

Chevron Texaco’s culpability in the “Amazon Chernobyl” of Ecuador is beginning to come to light here. Stiglitz visits one of the farmers whose livelihood and health have been destroyed as his water supply turned to oily sludge. In next month’s Amnesty International Film Festival (November 12-15), The Blood of Kouan Kouan (64 min., 2008) and Justicia Now! (31 min., 2007) home-in on the poisoning of one of the most biodiverse regions in the world.

Back at VIFF, we also have Joe Berlinger’s compelling documentary Crude (2009), covering the David versus Goliath legal battle between the indigenous people of Ecuador and one of the richest companies on the planet, bent on outmanoeuvring its opponents with money, time and spin. Chevron provides several spokespeople – mostly corporate lawyers, but there’s also an unconvincing environmental spokesperson – who all seem to grasp at straws in their defence. As the young, native lawyer Pablo Fajardo (he heads the prosecution) says, expensive lawyers can’t hide the bare facts. The decades-long case continues and the film reveals that Chevron is inching closer to possibly the largest environmental damages award in history.

VIFF info at www.viff.org ChevronToxico info at www.chevrontoxico.com Robert Alstead blogs VIFF at www.iofilm.com

Robert Alstead made the Vancouver documentary You Never Bike Alone. www.youneverbikealone.com. He writes at www.2020Vancouver.com