Black Gold
DIR: Marc Francis, Nick Francis • PROD: Marc Francis, Nick Francis, Jen Kaczor • DOP: Ben Cole, Nick Francis • ED: Hught Williams • CAST: Terrence Howard, Tadesse Meskela

Black Gold is a documentary by Nick Francis and Marc Francis, which shows all the different stages of coffee production, from farms in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, to coffee shops in Italy and America. It focuses in particular on the Ethiopian farmers who are being crippled by coffee prices that are disproportionate to the kind of money being made at the other end of the business.

The film follows Tadesse Meskela, the manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers’ Cooperative Union. The Union represents 74,000 farmers, and is trying to bypass the international trading system by finding buyers who would pay more for his high quality coffee. Messkela guides the filmmakers through every stage, including a processing plant where hundreds of women work for eight hours and about a dollar a day picking out a few bad beans from thousands of good ones.

It’s an unobtrusive film, being more about the subject than the filmmakers, which makes a nice change. Sometimes it's good to have a strong figurehead for a cause, but those people can also be used as targets as a way to avoid confronting the real issues (e.g. ‘Michael Moore is fat’ jokes). It's also good to see a film about Africa where the protagonist is actually African, and not, say, a white American putting on a South African accent. Ganted, it’s a documentary, so the rules are different, but I think it's an important difference when the story is told by one of the people involved. It is their story, after all. He's a great protagonist, too; he loves his job (we first meet him regretting the poor quality of the bags they have to ship out their coffee beans in) and obviously cares about the people he represents. There's a lot to be said for people who love what they do (and there's a lot of that here, including a super-perky Starbucks manager and a competitive coffee-maker), but are also angry about the inequities that are being faced by themselves and others.

If you want to learn about fair trade, and unfair trade (Africa is the only country to lose money in world trade in the last twenty years, a time when supposedly they’ve been given huge amounts of aid), this film is worth a watch. It’s smart and interesting, and makes its points without hitting you over the head with them. It's also interesting if you like coffee.

Tim Hanan
(Read biog here)

Rated TBC (see IFCO website for details)
Black Gold is released on 22th June 2007.
Black Gold – Official website