Black Gold | Review

Doc does more than play the blame game.

While Mondovino gave as a lecture on the crushed-grape business, documentary filmmakers Nick and Marc Francis serve a bottomless cup of facts on the piping hot issue of unfair trading and economic inequality. Blame Starbucks. Blame the WTO. Blame yourself.

In theory, profit sharing is a beautiful notion – of course that all depends on who you ask. Black Gold takes a critical, yet more humane look into where the bucks stops and while its not as unflattering as Darwin’s Nightmare, coffee lovers will either want to stay away from these truths or at least ask themselves – where does my four dollar cup of coffee come from and has the lady in the green cap with the phony smile asked herself that same question?

Back and forth the doc examines the realities of the coffee picker and the coffee drinker, the Francis bros. choose a discourse that looks at what and where the problem lies. There are pot shots at coffee drinkers – and what better place than the masses of talking heads found in the streets of Seattle to New York. These moments of comic relief could have easily have gone the Michael Moore route but this is less of an attempt to discredit regular folk – as the bros. are simply trying to relay this information to all the cup of Joe drinkers of the planet.

Extremely efficient in runtime, Black Gold does a great job at highlighting the system flow of the 2nd most traded commodity on the planet with a solid collection of well-edited images and the luck of watching a pioneer in a pro coffee growers fair-trade messiah in Mr. Tadesse Meskela certainly ensures that viewers will get more than just a filmmaker’s perspective on the issue. Informative, sometimes entertaining and highly educational, perhaps one day it will be more than just fashionable to share the profits with our neighbors.

Sundance 2006.

Rating 3.5 stars