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Book Review
| Between Midnight and the Rooster's Crow. By Nadja Drost, filmmaker. Brooklyn, NY: First Run/Icarus Films, 2005. 66 minutes. DVD or VHS. $348.00.
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| Petroleum from the Ecuadorian rainforest has proven flammable in more ways than one. While it fuels about a third of the country's economy, its extraction also has sparked controversy and violence over oil-soaked fields, contaminated rivers, sickened children, and ruined livelihoods. |
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Enter EnCana, Canadian energy giant and main protagonist in this award-winning film. The company professes a commitment to corporate social responsibility. Not so, says young Canadian filmmaker Nadja Drost. To prove her point, she follows the company's pipeline from the Amazon and over the Andes, recording what she sees and hears. In the process, she becomes part of the story, confronting police and heavy-handed security personnel. Authorities warn local people not to talk to her. |
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Energy projects seldom make pretty stories, and this is not a pretty documentary. We see rainbow-hued slicks shimmering ominously on a mountain stream. "When we eat fish, it's like eating pure crude," says a local resident. |
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Drost and a farmer inspect a brushy field that was formerly a disposal site. Just as a cat covers its waste with earth and leaves, says the farmer, so does the oil company. Drost takes a stick and pries a sticky clump from the ground. She sniffs it. "That's crude, all right," she says. |
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Local authorities do the company's bidding. A farmer who resisted demands that he sell his land was visited by two busloads of pistol-firing police. The farmer showed a handful of cartridge casings. "I grabbed our children and ran to the hills," he said. Another farmer was thrown into jail for obstructing company operations. He recalls asking the judge: "Do you think that one person can threaten 70 police and military, 150 workers and 38 machines?" |
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Visual imagery thrives on contrasts. "Look, her whole body is covered with these," says a mother as Drost pans up and down a child's sore-covered limbs. Later she cuts to sleekly groomed company executives at EnCana's Calgary headquarters, looking like models in an advertisement for a retirement community. "All we can do," said one EnCana official, "is go into the countries, abide by their laws, and do our best." |
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Documentary producers are not scholars. Their favored currency is advocacy, not objectivity. A farmer shows Drost his coffee bushes, their berries blackened and shriveled. "It could be the gas," he says. An agronomist might have offered another interpretation. While she concedes that many of the problems were created by EnCana's predecessors, she makes only a fleeting reference to what the company has done to right previous wrongs. |
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Drost's story presents the classic confrontation between good and evil—the absolute good of humble people vs. the absolute evil of a duplicitous, cynical, and greedy company and its government allies. Of course real life is not a morality play. In fact, multinational firms no longer conduct business as usual in Third World countries, mostly because it would be bad business. Things have improved. But Drost skillfully and forcefully shows that they have not improved enough. |
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Roger Hamilton is editor of the magazine of the Inter-American Development Bank. He reports and writes extensively on biodiversity conservation in Latin America. The views expressed here represent his views alone, and not necessarily those of the institution. |
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