germany

The Big Sellout (Der Grosse Ausverkauf) (Director: Florian Opitz, Germany, 2006): Beautifully shot on film, The Big Sellout is yet another strong political documentary, this one on the theme of privatization. Since privatization is a keystone of neoliberal economic policy all over the world, the film takes us to several different locales to see its effects on real people. What we discover is that the effort by multinational corporations to turn the necessities of life (healthcare, electricity, even water) into commodities is having a devastating effect on the people of the developing world.

In the Philippines, Minda spends all of her time trying to scrape money together for dialysis treatments for her teenaged son. In South Africa, Bongani is part of a group of skilled activists who restore electrical service to those whose power has been cut off for non-payment. In Bolivia, Rosa is a grandmother who stood up to the faceless corporation that was attempting to privatize her city’s water supply. And in England, Simon the train driver details the breakup of British Rail and the decline of rail service in that country.

In every case, privatization was the culprit, but to be fair, Opitz attempts to engage with the economists at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund who often impose privatization as a precondition for lending to developing nations. Surprisingly for the director, he gets very little cooperation from these shadowy bodies, who are ostensibly required to be transparent and accountable to their member nations. The one economist he does interview is Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank who now disagrees with the rush to privatize everything, and who has become an opponent of most of the economic policies of globalization.

I was reminded when watching this film of several other strong anti-globalization documentaries of recent years, including The Take, The Corporation, and even The Yes Men. The Big Sellout adds some heartrending personal stories from several corners of the world, and it’s clear that privatization is really only helping those with too much money make even more of it. Without having to pay lip service to the democratic ideals of national governments, corporations are concerned with just one thing: the pursuit of profits. The profits may come, but the human costs should be tallied against them.

The only weakness in the film may be that I was left wondering what I could possibly do, in my comfortable First World life, to combat this creeping sickness. The film’s German web site has some educational materials, so I hope these get translated for the English site soon.

Here is the Q&A with producer Florian Opitz from after the screening:

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Duration: 12:37

Official site for the film

(9/10)

Tagged as: bolivia, Documentaries, economics, germany, globalization, Hot Docs, philippines, politics, privatization, southafrica, uk

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Workingman’s Death (Austria/Germany, director Michael Glawogger): After you see this film, you’ll never complain about your job again. Subtitled something like “Five Portraits of Work in the Twenty-First Century,” Glawogger’s documentary features some of the most dangerous, difficult, or just plain unpleasant work in the world.

Each segment except the last one is about twenty-five minutes long, and is shot without any voiceover narration and very little editorializing. We are simply presented with people working and talking about their work. The director possesses a very painterly sense of composition, and we’re often presented with shots of workers posing as if they were in front of a still camera. The camerawork is even more impressive when it is moving, and I often found myself wondering how they were able to film in some of these conditions.

The segments follow, in order, a group of miners in Ukraine who have dug their own coal shafts, a group of men in Indonesia who collect sulfur from an active volcano and haul it down the mountainside, butchers at an open-air slaughterhouse in Nigeria, men who break apart rusting ships for scrap metal in Pakistan, and steelworkers in China. Although all of these workers are merely surviving, the thing that struck me most was how contented, even happy, most of them were.

That being said, three of the five segments featured Islamic societies, and I found myself wondering about the connections between the conditions these men were working in and the rise of Islamic radicalism. Among the shipbreakers in Pakistan, for instance, there was an interesting segment which followed a photographer who circulated among the men charging them a fee to take pictures of them holding an assault rifle. There was no voiceover, but I got the impression that these men wanted to be seen as revolutionaries instead of just subsistence scrap workers.

The most intense segment had to be among the butchers, and there was quite a lot of blood and gore evident as we watched the men work. But strangely, I found this a more honest approach to the production of food than I saw in the factory farms in We Feed The World. These butchers are “hands-on,” literally.

The final segment, filmed among steelworkers in China, was the shortest, and the least interesting, but the director was trying to end with the optimism of the Chinese workers for the steel industry, which he contrasts with shots of a defunct steel mill in Germany that’s been turned into an art installation. His point was slightly unclear, but overall, his unflinching eye for detail, even in some harrowing work environments, makes this documentary a must-see.

(9/10)

Tagged as: austria, Documentaries, germany, globalization, TIFF

Lost Children (Germany/Uganda, 2005, Directors: Ali Samadi Ahadi, Oliver Stoltz, 98 minutes): All three of the films I saw today were about “children in peril” but none were more horrifying than this one. Northern Uganda has been caught up in civil war for almost twenty years. The rebels of the “Lord’s Resistance Army” make it their primary tactic to kidnap children from local villages, forcing them to fight in their army. Children as young as 8 are taught to kill with guns and knives, and those who don’t share in the atrocities are killed themselves, often by other conscripted children.

Catholic relief agency Caritas is running a reintegration centre for those children who manage to escape the rebel army. It is a formidable challenge. Often the children have physical injuries, either sustained in battle or in their harrowing escapes. The mental damage is much harder to repair. They often have nightmares, and are terrified of being reabducted. Their families are suspicious of them, and are also afraid of being targetted again by the rebels. In these circumstances, the social workers and doctors at the centre have their hands full.

We meet Jennifer, 14, who spent five years with the Lord’s Resistance Army, fighting government troops and terrorizing civilians, all the while being raped regularly as a commander’s concubine. And Opio, just 8 years old, describing how he bashed in a man’s skull with a rifle butt. Then there is sensitive Kelama, 13, who was forced to kill a woman in front of her child and who now can’t stop dreaming about her. All these children have a long road ahead of them, first reintegrating with their families and communities, and then hoping that the rebels don’t return for them.

It’s difficult to “rate” films like this, because they don’t really function as pieces of art. Instead, they fulfill another aspect of the documentary’s role, that of bearing witness. In that sense, this film is a clear-eyed look at some of the most horrifying crimes against children ever perpetrated. By making children do their killing for them, the so-called “Lord’s Resistance Army” have killed the childhoods of these children. As they piece together the shreds of their humanity, they are no longer children. What they will become is a mystery.

Information on helping the children here.

Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers

(9/10)

Tagged as: children, Documentaries, germany, Hot Docs, uganda