Welcome to the summer edition of A Law Librarian in the Dark. In this issue, I will review a documentary that has received critical acclaim for its examination of environmental disaster, class action litigation, multinational corporations and celebrity causes.
I first learned about the documentary “Crude” while scanning the program for the 2009 New York Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Dubbed as the inside story of the “Amazon Chernobyl” case, the film caught my eye, both because of the positive reception it had received and because it deals with an interesting area of the law - class action environmental litigation.
The movie begins quietly - a lone woman in Amazon rain forest talks about the problems that were brought to her family and community by oil companies. She speaks about the contaminated land, the polluted water, the sickness and the deaths that came when the oil companies came. She is one of the last members of the Cofan, a community indigenous to the northeastern area of Ecuador.
She sings a song:
We lived upon the river of rich, clean waters. With the arrival of the company and their contamination, my brothers are now dead. I am the only survivor of my family. The message of my song is to tell the world, so the world can know what has been done.
From this quiet beginning, the movie spins into a complicated and moving story about a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorans against Chevron for the pollution of the Amazon rain forest in which they live. The documentary covers years 2006 and 2007 in a case which has been litigated for more than fourteen years. Through interviews, footage of judicial inspections and scenes with attorneys and litigants, both sides of the controversy are represented. Families who have been affected with cancer explain the sorrow they have had to undergo. Pits of sludge, foul water and dead animals are shown. A local nurse treats babies with terrible skin rashes. On the other hand, there are several interviews with a Chevron environmental scientist who insists there are no increased cancer rates in the area and that the water is not contaminated and lawyers for Chevron shift the blame to the state run oil company which had been drilling there since the 1990s.
Despite the movie’s attention to presenting both sides of the story, the center of the drama is the team of Plaintiff attorneys - Steven Donziger, a brash American, and Pablo Fajardo, a reserved Ecuadoran attorney who is cast as the David in a 14 year legal battle against the Goliath that is Chevron. We see the attorneys trudging through polluted fields in the jungle, arguing before judges in Ecuadoran courtrooms, and prepping their clients at a Marriott in Houston. It is clear that the plaintiffs’ attorneys dedicate every waking moment to this frustrating case.
Events take a turn when the case starts gets attention and support from the new president Rafael Correa. The president condemns the oil companies for contaminating the environment and subjecting the Ecuadoran people to pollution. Shortly thereafter, Vanity Fair publishes an article about Fajardo and his struggle and celebrity Trudie Styler (wife of Sting) publicizes his cause stating “these people have been systematically poisoned.” The documentary presents a world in which people from many walks of life – from celebrities to corporate shareholders to indigenous families are connected and must deal with the consequences of environmental catastrophe.
The Crude DVD was released on February 23, 2010, by First Run Features. Special Features include audio commentary by director Joe Berlinger and an interview with Joe Berlinger and Trudie Styler.