Hot Docs Report: Black Gold REVIEW

Anyway, I, however, feel perfectly able to comment on Black Gold, because I love coffee. I love coffee so much that I’ve had to force myself to cut down to avoid crippling daily headaches if I didn’t guarantee a certain level of intake, and let me tell you – that was a hard couple of weeks. Despite my best intentions, since coming to Canada I’ve been partaking of coffee without ever really thinking about where it came from – other than out of a Tim Horton’s pot. Black Gold is a film that asked me to reassess that position.

The core of the film is a co-operative of coffee growers in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee. Co-operative manager Tadasse Meskela is a fair trade advocate and the film covers his valiant attempts to care for his coffee farmers and to sell his coffee directly to western coffee roasters and sellers, cutting out the middleman. With coffee a $55 billion industry, one which continues to grow, and the Ethiopian coffee farmers some of the poorest people in the world, this film reveals one of the most awful swindles that is being perpetrated on some of the hardest working people in Africa.

Black Gold is filmed beautifully, with even the scenes of extreme poverty in Ethiopia given a cinematic sheen, but this seems to come at a cost of hard facts, that at points even descends to glibness. A ‘comic relief’ scene of a tour visiting the very first Starbucks in Seattle, featuring the manager espousing meaningless corporate doublespeak about Starbucks as a company that ‘sells smiles’ (or something) is contrasted with scenes of a therapeutic feeding centre in Northern Ethiopia, the location where Starbucks purchases it’s Ethiopian coffee beans. While scenes of children with stick thin legs is traumatic, no actual causality is demonstrated between the two, and there is enough conflicting information on Starbucks and fair trade out there already. Though supposed to be the biggest purchaser of fair trade coffee in the world, I’m told it’s not brewed daily at its stores.

Scenes such as those of Tadasse, the emotional heart of the picture, upset in the coffee aisle of Waitrose add to it’s effectiveness as a piece of fair trade propaganda, but not as a successful documentary. However, in the end, that the film’s feel good ending is a group of Tadasse’s farmers agreeing to finally build a school in their community, even though the co-operative doesn’t make enough money to sustain it, speaks volumes. They agree that they’ll pay for it out of their own pocket if they have to.

It is honestly only fair to buy coffee at fair trade prices. It’s just a shame that this documentary doesn’t display this fact more successfully.