Crude On DVD

Three years in the making, this cinéma-vérité feature from acclaimed filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) is the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet. An inside look at the infamous $27 billion “Amazon Chernobyl” case, Crude is a real-life high stakes legal drama set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, the media, multinational corporate power, and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures. Presenting a complex situation from multiple viewpoints, the film subverts the conventions of advocacy filmmaking as it examines a complicated situation from all angles while bringing an important story of environmental peril and human suffering into focus.

I visited the Ecuadorean Amazon for the first time in 2005, and was shown a shocking ecological disaster. I saw and smelled the foul petrochemical sludge that for decades has been dumped into open pits or directly into the water and soil—a system designed by Texaco when the company began drilling for oil there in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s (in 2001, Texaco was acquired by Chevron). I talked with people who were sick and dying from cancer and other diseases—some of the 30,000 settlers and indigenous people who call themselves los afectados, “the affected ones.” I also met Pablo Fajardo, the remarkable 35-year-old lawyer who was once a poor manual laborer in the oil fields. Pablo still lives in relative poverty, but today he is the lead attorney in the largest oil-related environmental lawsuit on the planet.

I left that first trip feeling sick – literally, from the noxious fumes I ingested – and figuratively, from the things I saw and stories I heard. I knew there was an important story to be told, but I quickly realized that if I was going to go through with the extraordinary effort it would take to make a film, I would have to do something different than what might be expected from this kind of environmental story. I wanted to break from the standard formula of an environmental disaster exposé, and create a unique and challenging cinematic experience that brings an audience into a world they probably have never seen before.

In making this film, I felt it was important not just to show the situation and try to point fingers at a culprit, but to pull back and tell this massive – and massively complicated – story from a wider and more nuanced viewpoint. How did this happen in the first place? What are the roles of corporate power, of government, the media, and big money in a case with the long history and potentially enormous consequences as this one? What does it take to tackle a problem of this magnitude? Is it really as bad as it seems? I knew that to do the story justice and also satisfy my own creative and journalistic impulses, I would have to go beyond simply showing the alleged environmental damage and human suffering and explore the messy, ambiguous process of getting justice in the real world.

Much of my previous work, such as Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, has sought to break down stereotypes and preconceived notions and probe beneath the surface of people and situations. In the real world, things aren’t black and white, and this is how I approached this story, as well. An indigenous Amazonian leader doesn’t just show up at a Chevron shareholders’ meeting and confront the CEO all by himself – he is coached by a Harvard-educated attorney. The Ecuadorean plaintiffs can’t spend fifteen years in court on their own – they need a high-powered Philadelphia law firm specializing in class action lawsuits to pay for the investigations that

Ecuadorean law requires – and that law firm stands to profit from any judgment. The attorneys for both the oil company and the plaintiffs compete for media attention, but the spotlight on the case gets brighter when celebrity activists Trudie Styler and Sting come on board. Yet here too I hope the film topples the usual clichés, as Trudie proves herself to be anything but a token “rent-a-celeb,” delivering on a promise she makes to help ease the suffering of the people. And while some people may initially perceive the representatives from Chevron as simply being part of a “big bad oil company,” they come across as real human beings who make a number of very intriguing legal and scientific claims.

Despite these ambiguities, the film never loses sight of what has true value. In the midst of the messy, murky world of this case, there are still good guys to root for, and even a clear hero in Pablo Fajardo. Cool and calm in the jungle, surrounded by press and adversarial lawyers, Pablo is unwavering in his insistence that you cannot put a price tag on human life, clean air and water or a healthy planet, regardless of who is right or wrong in the lawsuit. One of the themes of the film is that in a world in which the Exxon Valdez judgment took nearly two decades to appeal, it will be generations before this case is fully resolved. So while the lawyers argue and various parties jockey for position with the media, the indigenous people who have lived in harmony with nature on these lands for millennia continue to suffer. That’s why the last scene of the film shows a group of Cofán Indians heading down river to an uncertain future. At the end of the journey of the film, Crude comes back to where it started, bearing witness to the lives of these people and the once-rich land they live on, leaving us to think about why this story matters to us all.