Posted on

Bananas!*

followthethings.com
Grocery

Bananas!*
A documentary film directed by Fredrik Gertten for WG Film AG, Sweden
Free trailer and on demand stream embedded above. Search online for other streaming options here.
The first of two films on this topic. The second is “Big Boys Gone Bananas!*”. See our page in this here.

Swedish Filmmaker Fredrik Gertten tracks a ‘class action’ legal case in which lawyers working on behalf of a group of Nicaraguan banana workers sue the American fruit multinational Dole in a Califiornia court for exposing them to a banned pesticide known to cause impotency in men. Gertten follows a flamboyant Cuban-heritage, Los-Angeles based lawyer called Juan ‘Accidentes’ Domingiuez as he and his team gather evidence from affected workers and present it in court. Grainy court-TV footage is cut into the film, and the scenes are remarkable. Dominguez’ attourney Dwane Miller encourages Alberto Rosales and other plaintiffs to explain how their lives were ruined by these chemicals robbing them of their fertility. And when Dole CEO David Delorenzo is in the dock, Miller gets him to admit that Dole used these banned pesticides knowing the risk. Dole attorney Rick McKnight cross examines the plaintiffs, aiming to show they are drunks and liars. When the verdict comes in, Dole is largely found guilty and ordered to pay compensation to the plaintiffs. Dominguez conveys the good news to the farming communities, phoning in to a radio show, and visiting to talk to a packed hall of workers. He’s a hero. But this is a test-case. If it’s successful, thousands of other victims would be able to claim compensation from Dole too. So, as the film is being readied for its premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Dole launches a sophisticated smear campaign against Dominguez (accusing him of fraud – a charge later discmissed) and the film (which they claim is based on fraudulent content). Suspiciously, damning reviews appear in newspapers and film trade publications before teh film has its premiere (i.e. before anyone had seen it). Dole forces it to be taken out of competition and the festival organiser reads a disclaimer to the audience before its only screening. Fredrik Gertten, the director, doesn’t know it at the time but this is be the first of two films he will make on this topic. The second will be about Dole’s attempts to silence the first. He films everything as the chaos unfolds. [See our page on the sequel – ‘Big Boys Gone Bananas!*’ – here] But this scandal means Bananas!* picks up priceless free publicity, and diverse allies, worldwide. When it’s finally distributed, it’s marketed as ‘the film Dole doesn’t want you to see.’ Maybe if Dole had left it alone, Bananas!* wouldn’t have become a ‘must see’ example of trade justice fillmmaking, then and now. If their corporate public relations team had decided to just keep quiet, they wouldn’t have amplified Dole’s corporate misbehaviour that Bananas!* tracked so diligently. Amplifying a critique by trying to silence it is called the ‘Streisand Effect’, by the way, and this isn’t the only example on our site. So much happened in and around this film that this is an epic followthethings.com page. There are so many comments to read. But does the scandal about the silencing of the film distract from the scandal of Dole’s banned pesticide use, and its effects on so many thousands of banana workers in Nicaragua? As you will see, the answer is yes and no.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2020) Bananas!*. followthethings.com/bananas.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 100 minutes.

Continue reading Bananas!*
Posted on

Ghosts

followthethings.com
Grocery

Ghosts
A documentary-drama film written by Nick Broomfield, Jez Lewis & Hsiao-Hung Pai, directed by Nick Broomfield for Beyond Films
Official trailer embedded above. Available on Box of Broadcasts (with institutional login) here. Search online here for other streaming availability. The movie website archive is here.

Documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield is known for his quirky, in-front-of-camera documentaries but, after a 2004 disaster where 23 Chinese migrant workers picking cockles were drowned by a fast-incoming tide in the UK’s Morecamble Bay, he decides to make a docu-drama to show what happened and why. This is a tale of people smuggling, modern slavery and violent, corrupt gangmasters sourcing and providing cheap slave labour in the UK to pick vegetables like spring onions and seafood like cockles for sale in mainstream supermarkets (which the film names). The script was co-written with Hsiao-Hung Pai – a Taipei-heritage UK journalist and writer – and was researched through the writers’ visit to China to visit the victims’ families. The film starred former illegal immigrant Chinese non-actors working with an improvised script, using traditional and undercover filmmaking, and ends with a plea for audience members to donate to a fund to help the dead workers’ families pay their people-smuggling debts. The tale is told from the perspective of a female worker called Ai Qin. She and her compatriots speak in Mandarin so that that ‘Ghosts’ – their white gangmasters – can’t understand they are mocking them. In the final scene, just before Ai Qin drowns, she calls her son in China to sing him a farewell lullaby on her mobile phone. The film encourages viewers to ask who is to blame for their deaths? The migrant workers? The people smugglers and gangmasters? The supermarkets? The government? In the UK? In China? Ghosts was made to be put to use, and to have a positive impact, on public attitudes to migrant workers, on the law and on the victims’ families. In contrast to a documentary film, a docu-drama can script and film anything, anyone, anywhere. So a fuller picture of the challenges that workers and trade justice activists face can be pieced together to provoke change.

Page reference: Harriet Allen, Etienne Heaume, Lizzie Heeley, Rosie Hedger, Sam Johnson, Olivia McGregor & Lucy Webber (2025) Ghosts. followthethings.com/ghosts.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 104 minutes.

Continue reading Ghosts
Posted on

Gold Farmers

followthethings.com
Money & Finance

Gold Farmers
A documentary film written & directed by Ge Jin
Trailer embedded above. Search here for the whole film (sometimes uploaded in parts) online.

Travelling between China and USA, filmmaker Ge Jin talks to men who play Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) like ‘World of Warcraft’ and ‘Lineage’. Its players in the USA sometimes exchange real dollars for the game’s online currency in order to pay for extra game features like swords or amulets. They could earn online currency themselves in-game but, instead, talk about buying it. But that currency is produced and sold by Chinese men who play the same games all day in ‘gold farms’ to make a meagre living. Their places of work are described as ‘virtual sweatshops’ where they earn and sell virtual money through the labour of online game-play. But – unlike most – these producers and consumers meet and interact (albeit online, in the games that they play). They inhabit in the same online worlds, but as consumers and workers, buyers and sellers. This documentary film is an early example of ‘follow the thing’ activism focused on a digital commodity. So what do these players imagine and know about one another? How is one’s enjoyable leisure time activity affecting another’s full time work?

Page reference: Jack Parkin (2012) Gold Farmers (taster). followthethings.com/gold-farmers.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes.

Continue reading Gold Farmers
Posted on

Dow Vs Bhopal: A Toxic Rap Battle

followthethings.com
Home & Auto

Dow Vs Bhopal: A Toxic Rap Battle
A music video by Sofia Ashraf published on YouTube.
Embedded in full above.

Chennai rap musician Sofia Ashraf’s Nicki Minaj-sampling protest song ‘Kodakainal Won’t’ goes viral on YouTube in 2015, drawing attention to a Unilever factory in India dumping mercury into the environment. A year later, she releases this video to draw attention to the most notorious industrial disaster in Indian history: an explosion at the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal in 1984 which released poisonous gas that killed more than 15,000 people and sickened over half a million more. A campaign has been running ever since for the victims to be compensated and the toxic legacy of the explosion to be cleaned up, even after Union Carbide was bought by Dow Chemical. Ashraf revived a rap written and performed in 2008 to support an NGO petition to the US Government’s Department of Justice to hold Dow Chemical to account. If the petition reaches 125,000 signatures, the DoJ is obliged to respond. In the video, Ashraf performs both sides of the argument as she sees it: the Indian activist side calling Dow Chemical to account, and the US government’s disdainful approach to those demanding compensation. The video encourages people to sign the petition. The 125,000 goal is reached. But what does this unlock? What can protest music do for trade justice activism?

Page reference: Nicole Sparks, Ginny Childs, Allie Short, Kat Cook, Lauren Warner & Sophie Wolf (2016) Dow Vs Bhopal: A Toxic Rap Battle (taster). followthethings.com/dow-vs-bhopal-a-toxic-rap-battle.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

Continue reading Dow Vs Bhopal: A Toxic Rap Battle
Posted on

A Week In A Toxic Waste Dump

followthethings.com
Recycle my waste

A Week In A Toxic Waste Dump
A documentary film presented by Reggie Yates, produced by Harriet Morter for BBC TV.
Available in full above (with ads). Available on the BBC’s iPlayer platform without ads (with login) here. Search online for streaming options here.

Agbogbloshie is a notorious e-waste dump on the outskirts of Accra, the capital city of Ghana. It’s where Western electronics ‘go to die’. It’s where migrant workers from the North of Ghana move to take up low paid and dangerous work recycling this waste. They recover valuable scrap metals like copper from discarded electrical devices, most famously by burning the plastic or rubber coatings from their wires. The smoke is acrid, poisonous. Processing this waste here has polluted the soil, the water table, the air, and the health of the people who work and live here. It’s a textbook case of the evils of Western consumption. In terms of toxic landscapes, some say, Agbogbloshie is in the same league as Chernobyl. In 2017, Reggie Yates (a British Radio and TV celebrity with Ghanaian heritage) spends a week here. It’s for an episode of a documentary TV series in which he tries to understand the lives lived by people less fortunate than himself by living with them for a week, doing the work that they do, sleeping where they sleep, eating what they eat, and being followed around by a film crew to capture every moment. In Agbogbloshie, he gets to know a group of ‘burner boys’ who are in their 20s called Razak, Awal, Yahro Muhammed and their chief. They show him what they do, burning the plastic off wires, dousing the bright orange flames in puddles of water in the mud, bagging up the bare copper, and selling it on for pennies. As Reggie gets to know these young men, he starts to care about them, becomes concerned about how they can support their families, and their children, on such low wages earned from work that will shorten their lives. They have serious health problems already. He wants viewers in the UK to feel culpable. Most don’t have a clue where their discarded electrical devices go to die. And the damage that this waste can do to people less fortunate than them in poorer countries. Like these ‘burner boys’ in Ghana. Lots of Western journalists and photographers have visited Agbogbloshie to tell this same story. Many seem to have met Razal, Awal, Yahro and Muhammed. They’ve acted as fixers, helping these visitors to tell the story they have heard about by providing testimony and burning plastic and rubber in photogenic ways. People who are in touch with the ‘burner boys’ say that they appreciated Reggie’s efforts to muck in, they thought he was cool. But waste academics in Ghana and overseas, as well as local commentators, have a problem with this story that Reggie and everyone else visits to tell. It’s one of those narratives of exploitation that has a questionable origin, quickly becomes iconic, and attracts visitors to tell ready-made versions of it over and over again. It’s a trope. Bad things happen in the Global South. Impoverished workers are suffering. Unthinking consumers in the global North are responsible for this. The media tells the story using authentic found characters with whom a celebrity presenter is able to spend time and to empathise. The audience is invited to empathise with the presenter empathising with the found characters. This encourages powerful emotional and practical responses, debates about the causes of the problem – like capitalism – potential solutions – like an industrial waste plant – and problems with the potential solutions – the ‘burner boys’ would suffer. But what if researchers and on-the-ground commenters reported that Agbogbloshie is quite a small dump, and that the e-waste processed there was mainly from Ghana? There’s next to nothing about the international waste supply chain in this film. What if the dump had been demolished in 2021, partly because of the toxic reputation that these repeated media exposés had given the place? And what if most of the online debate about this documentary had taken place two or three years after the dump had closed? Reggie’s documentary was published on YouTube in 2023 and 2024: giving it a worldwide audience that it had never originally had but also generating a huge fuss about a place that no longer existed. Everyone seem to agree that Reggie is cool, a genuinely empathetic person, but why didn’t the team behind his film seem to have done their homework? A very different story could – and maybe should – have been told.

Page reference: Lucian Harford (2025) Ghana: a Week In A Toxic Waste Dump. followthethings.com/ghana-a-week-in-a-toxic-waste-dump.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 77 minutes.

Continue reading A Week In A Toxic Waste Dump
Posted on

Waste Land

followthethings.com
Recycle my waste

Waste Land
A documentary film starring Vik Muniz, soundtrack by Moby, directed by Lucy Walker for Almega Projects & 02 Films.
Trailer embeded abive. Search online for streaming options here.

“When we throw out rubbish, it is easy to assume that it somehow vanishes. In fact, of course, it largely goes to landfill sites such as Jardim Gramacho in Rio De Janeiro: the world’s biggest dump, a huge, undulating, foul-smelling, seagull-covered landscape of garbage which is home to about 3,000 people, who work all day picking out material that can be sold on to commercial recycling companies. Uneaten food found there is gratefully consumed. [Director] Walker follows [Brazilian-heritage, New York based artist Vik] Muniz as he works on a project creating portraits of the pickers, using the materials from this site, which will be sold at auction, with the profits going to the pickers themselves, or rather their representative campaigning group” (Source: Bradshaw 2011, np link).

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Waste Land (holding page). followthethings.com/waste-land.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: tbc minutes.

Continue reading Waste Land
Posted on

Where Heaven Meets Hell

followthethings.com
Grocery | Health & Beauty | Home & Auto |

Where Heaven Meets Hell
A documentary film produced by Sasha Friedlander for Sasha Films LLC & Independent Television Service
Trailer embedded above. Search for online streaming here. Track down a DVD copy here.

Filmmaker Sasha Friedlander visits a stunningly beautiful active volcano in Indonesia called Kawa Ijen. Heaven. It’s a place that loads of tourists visit to take photos of this bubbling cauldron of toxic sulphur gas. They’re also shocked and amazed to see men emerging out of these sulphur clouds carrying on their shoulders baskets containing blocks of raw yellow sulphur, mined hot from the volcano’s insides. This is unbelievably picturesque, hard and dangerous work (physically and chemically). Some say it’s a vision of hell. Friedlander sticks around, her tiny crew following the sulphur miners down into the volcano to better understand the work that they do, their lives and their reasons for doing a job that’s clearly so poorly paid and so extraordinarily hazardous to their health. Making this film is hazardous to the filmmakers’ health too. They struggle with their working conditions. This film they make provides intimate portraits of four men who do this work and their families. Audiences are moved by what they see. It’s beautiful and horrific. Friedlander returns to the village where most of the miners live to show the film to their families. That’s filmed too. They’re shocked. The men hadn’t told their families what their work was like. Some commenters say that workers unhappy with their jobs should get a safer and better paid job somewhere else. They’ve ‘chosen’ to work there. This film shows why making a different ‘choice’ is not as easy as it sounds. Where Heaven Meets Hell follows the journey of sulphur up and out of the Kawa Ijen volcano, to the cabins where the miners get paid for it by weight. But that’s as far as the following goes. Sulphur (and its derivatives) can be found in countless commodities and the processes used to make them – e.g. it’s used to refine sugar, and its an essential ingredients of matches – because it brings specific properties that producers and consumers rely upon. Where Heaven Meets Hell is an excellent example of a follow the thing project that ‘starts somewhere different’. It doesn’t start or end at a factory, for example. Those followings can be nice and linear, easy to trace, easy to convey to an audience. But starting in a place where a raw material is extracted from the earth presents a different view of international trade. So many raw materials like sulphur travel along countless supply chains, and become ingredients in countless industrial processes and commodities. Following raw materials can be much, much more complex. The supply chains of something basic like sulphur can infiltrate so many other supply chains, so many other things, so many other places and lives. This means that any trade justice ‘solutions’ that audiences might want to support are from straightforward. Try boycotting sulphur! Start by looking for sulphur compounds on ingredient labels. That’s the top of the volcano.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2016) Where Heaven Meets Hell. followthethings.com/where-heaven-meets-hell.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 53 minutes.

Continue reading Where Heaven Meets Hell
Posted on

The Oil Road: Journeys From The Caspian Sea To The City Of London

followthethings.com
Home & Auto

The Oil Road: Journeys From The Caspian Sea To The City Of London”
A non-fiction travelogue by James Marriott & Mika Minio-Paluello, published by Verso.
Google Books preview embedded above.

‘Oil corporation resisters’ James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello travel the length of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline which carries crude oil from Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea oilfields to refineries in Europe and, from there, into the region’s cars, buses & other oil-burning machines. They find this oil’s human stories, secret places and complex connections, and companies and governments that don’t want them to be revealed. They investigate how British Petroleum – which operates and co-owns it – wields incredible power over the governments of the countries the pipeline passes through that it is able to sweep aside everyone and everything in its path. The Oil Road paints a picture of the West’s ‘energy imperialism’ and insatiable addiction to oil. But this is far from a dry academic or NGO report of ‘energy security’ and oil geopolitics. Rather, it’s a vivid piece of industrial / infrastructural travel writing. A page-turning detective thriller that’s accessible to readers who don’t identify as oil-geeks. The authors use a familiar road trip format for political advocacy, to ‘show the filthy entrails of the global economy close up’, as one commenter puts it. Some commenters rage at BP, and/or say the authors are obviously a biased against BP, and/or bemoan the lack of alternatives and/or express greater worries about the ‘carbon web’ that the book vividly – but only partly – reveals. This is thing-following in multiple ways. It follows oil along a pipeline. It follows the pipeline itself. And it follows the money generated by the oil flowing along the pipeline.

Page reference: Molly Mansfield, Louise Ford, Olivia Rogers, Millie Smith, Bryony Board & Charlotte Watts (2013) The Oil Road. followthethings.com/the-oil-road.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 33 minutes.

Continue reading The Oil Road: Journeys From The Caspian Sea To The City Of London
Posted on

Black Gold: Wake Up & Smell The Coffee

followthethings.com
Grocery

Black Gold: Wake Up & Smell The Coffee
A documentary film directed by Marc & Nick Francis, starring Tadesse Meskela, for Speak-It Films & Fulcrum Productions.
Trailer embeded above. Rent or buy on Vimeo here. Search streaming availability here.

At a time when coffee shops are appearing on every street corner in the Western world and the home of the world’s finest coffee beans is mired in poverty, British filmmakers Marc and Nick Francis don’t want to make yet another documentary about Ethiopia needing Western aid. They want to show Tadesse Maskela, a representative of an Ethiopian coffee co-operative, as he travels the world trying to get a better price for his farmers’ coffee. Tadesse is irritated that importers such as Starbucks are making massive profits from this coffee while the people who grow it in ‘the home of coffee’ don’t even have schools, clean water or healthcare. This is a fascinating ‘follow the people’ documentary because it chooses to follow a producer as they try to find where the commodity the grow and sell ends up, and who profits from them. It’s not a guilty consumer trying to find who made their stuff. It stars an African man on a quest in the Global North, looking for his coffee on the shelves of a British supermarket, asking questions not only about where the coffee goes, but where – and by whom – the profits from its trade are generated and enjoyed. How will people explain to him the extraordinary inequalities in wealth and poverty along the coffee supply chain? From his perspective, this doesn’t make sense.

Page reference: Blayne Tesfaye & Julia Potter (2012) Black Gold: Wake Up & Smell The Coffee. followthethings.com/blackgold.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 26 minutes.

Continue reading Black Gold: Wake Up & Smell The Coffee
Posted on

Radi-Aid: Africa For Norway

followthethings.com
Home & Auto

“Radi-aid: Africa For Norway
NGO video campaign by and for The Norwegian Students’ & Academics International Assistance Fund (SAIH).
Video playlist embedded above. Campaign website here.

It’s unusual to find a humanitarian campaign where people in the Global South take pity on people in the Global North and send them aid in the hope that it will improve their miserable, pitiless lives. The kind citizens of many African countries, blessed with warmth that many take for granted, get together to help the people of Norway who are suffering terribly from freezing cold temperatures. What better to send them? Electric radiators. Charity workers collect and deliver them to grateful aid recipients. They even record a charity single and video to raise awareness and funds, like Band Aid’s ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ or USA for Africa’s ‘We are the world’. Their song is just as awful. Just as patronising. Just as one dimensional. Just an inaccurate. Just as tear-jerking. This is a campaign by a Norwegian development NGO that wants to challenge the ‘white saviour complex’ that so much European development NGO fundraising is based upon. What if the tables were turned? What if you were represented in the way that you represent others? What if you found that offensive, partial, ridiculous? Would that lead you to think differently about humanitarian aid, the way it is represented in charity ads, and the things that its NGOs send to people who it sees as needy? Like goats. This campaign, and particularly the video for its charity single ‘Africa for Norway’, went viral. This became a very public debate. Who could have imagined that a gift of radiators could have been so effective?

Page reference: Marie Conmee, Rebecca Jones, Frederic Montaner-Wills, Thomas Paulsen, James Pidding, Hannah Rusbridge & Joe Shrimpton (2016) Radi-Aid: Africa For Norway (taster). followthethings.com/radi-aid.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes.

Continue reading Radi-Aid: Africa For Norway