Date:25/10/2006
Written By:Chantelle
'Black Gold' is the latest movie to reach the cinemas addressing the wonderful drink coffee.
This particular film however, is more of a documentary, with a great focus on the farmers of the industry, who often get overlooked. It becomes a social issue of morals and ethical standards, when, in an $80 billion-a-year industry, those who are nicknamed the 'sweathouses of the fields' are criminally underpaid for their long hours of picking and farming, or the factory workers who sort and bag the beans are also criminally underpaid.
Brothers Marc Francis and Nick Francis concentrate on Tadesse Meskela, who runs the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union. This union represents the interests and beans of some 74,000 coffee farmers. 'Black Gold' uncovers all the massive brick walls men like Meskela must fight against to help the farmers and themselves. The rivalry ranges from the dominant multinational corporations that control the global market prices, to the poverty-stricken, famine-ridden Ethiopia, which is the major location of filming for this movie.
At the same time the documentary touches on the caffeinated scenes of Seattle, New York, northern Italy and elsewhere, yet the focus remains with the origin of the bean, with the Ethiopian story. At the time of filming the farmers represented by this union were receiving 30-year-low prices for their crop.
The moral of the story, just like sponsoring a child, if you drink fair-trade coffee, you could essentially be improving someone's life just about overnight.
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