globalization

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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The World According To Sesame Street (USA, 2005, Director: LInda Goldstein Knowlton and Linda Hawkins, 105 minutes): Sesame Street has proved to be a very successful American export, now being seen in more than 120 countries. This film looks at the very unique process of establishing co-productions with local educators, producers and puppeteers, focussing on two challenging locations: Kosovo and Bangladesh.

By far the most time is spent on the Bangladeshi production, and the real star of the film is Sesame Workshop producer Nadia Zylstra, who began her job three weeks before filming began. We follow this very excitable South African woman as she begins the process of defining what the program will look like in Bangladesh. The film shows us the nuts and bolts of how the production comes together, and some of the challenges involved when dealing with local opposition and delays.

I enjoyed the film and found it very inspiring, but I think it missed a chance to dig a bit deeper into the issue of what some audience members called “cultural imperialism.” Though they’re very careful to “partner” with local people, the Sesame Street organization is still American and fuelled by American values and definitions of success. Some of the questions surrounding the “export” of an American model would have been very interesting to explore.

Reading his review after I wrote mine, I discovered that The Toronto Star’s Peter Howell agrees with me.

(8/10)

NOW Toronto: NNNN (out of 5) (review)
EYE Weekly: *** (out of 5) (review)

Tagged as: children, Documentaries, globalization, Hot Docs, Television

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

We Feed The World (Austria, director Erwin Wagenhofer): I would call this film a Mondovino for food. By which I mean it is an examination of how globalization and the growth of the power of corporations has affected the production of food. The director dispassionately takes us to farms in Romania and Brazil, a fishing boat in Brittany, a greenhouse in southern Spain, and a chicken processing plant in Austria.

In all these places, we see traditional practices being abandoned in favour of giant factory operations. In each place, someone on camera asserts that flavour is not as important as price or appearance. So we see hothouse tomatoes being driven 2500 kilometres to be sold, we see rainforest cleared to grow soybeans, even though the soil is unsuitable, and we see the entire eight-week life cycle of thousands of chickens, raised to supply the incessant demands of the world for cheap food. Watching factory-farmed chickens being “processed” might be enough to turn some people into vegetarians. Except for the fact that our vegetables are really no better.

There is some interesting information about GM (genetically modified) crops which are resistant to herbicides like Monsanto’s Roundup and the growing use of hybrid seed. Unlike regular seed, which farmers used to save from year to year, hybrid seed cannot be used to raise a second crop, forcing farmers to keep buying seed from large seed firms like Pioneer. This raises all kinds of issues, and I really think the film could have spent more time here.

The film ends with an interview with the CEO of Nestlé, the largest food manufacturer in the world, who muses on “attaching a value” to water, and calls the position of the NGOs, that access to clean water is a human right, “extreme”. After bragging how many jobs his corporation is creating, and how many families it is supporting, he glances at an informational video of one of Nestlé’s Japanese factories, and marvels how it is so roboticized. “Hardly any people,” he crows.

The only significant weakness to this documentary was its unrelenting gloom. I would have liked to have been given some ammunition or to have seen some success stories, or at least some rebellion. But there wasn’t any. Since I have an interest in this area, I can point you to the Slow Food organization, which is trying to encourage more consumption of local products and the preservation of disappearing foodstuffs. But I really wish the director had done it instead.

(8/10)

Tagged as: Documentaries, globalization, TIFF

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