(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Posted by Kaare M. Bilden and Mohsan M. Basit. Kaare at nytid.no
[stories] A number of new films tell the story of the life cycle of an item. 14. April, the coffee documentary Black Gold was released on DVD, and in May a café of the same name opens in Torshov in Oslo. The Luckiest Nut in The World tells the life story of a peanut, while the documentary China Blue is a biography of a pair of jeans.Fiction films also lend this narrative grip. Both Lord of War with Nicolas Cage and Blood Diamond with Leonardo DiCaprio have elements of commodity biography, although this is not the main focus of the films. In addition, there have also been some books in this genre, such as The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli, and Norwegian Simen Sætres The Little Ugly Chocolate Book.
Why do many people choose to tell stories this way?
-This is a great storytelling technique if you have a story to tell about something you either don't like to think about or often ignore in everyday life, says Kristin Skare Orgeret. She is an associate professor at the journalism education at Oslo University College, and has studied this trend.
-The narrator technique tells us a lot about the world in 2008. Goods and products are an important part of the identity we create. We use the products to signal who we are. The use of this narrative technique says something fundamental about our time, Orgeret continues.
The life of a bean
The British director Nick Francis was recently in Norway to launch the film Black Gold, a documentary about coffee. To Ny Tid, he says that it is more difficult to launch a film without a famous person like Brad Pitt in the lead role, but still he has chosen to put a coffee bean in the lead role.
-The film could just as well have been about other products. But the special thing about coffee is that it is part of a common lifestyle. The western world does not go to work without coffee, and you socialize in coffee shops, says Francis.
Black Gold tells the life story of a coffee bean; from germination on an Ethiopian farm, until it is picked, sold and transported from Ethiopia; processed, minced and finally drunk in a coffee shop in the West.
"We gave ourselves the challenge of filming the entire life of the coffee bean," Francis says.
-I lived with an Ethiopian family 12 years ago. The family performed some extensive coffee ceremonies that fascinated me. The idea grew over time and we realized that the life story of the coffee bean was a good way to show the connection between the consumers on the one hand, and the coffee farmers on the other end. We could have used a narrator's voice and explained how our everyday lives are connected to the farmers in Ethiopia, but we think this method was more effective, says Francis.
This is a contemporary technique, but at the same time an ancient way of telling stories that we recognize from both fairy tales and classical literature. Especially during the Romantic period, this was popular. Also in Scandinavia, our greatest writers wrote stories with things in the lead role.
-For example, Hans Christian Andersen wrote fairy tales with objects in the lead role, as in "The steadfast tin soldier". In Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's poem about Ingerid Sletten av Sillejord, it is through a hat that we are told about her life, says Orgeret.
Nicolas Cage vs Dag Terje Andersen
In our time, the recent New Time columnist Naomi Klein's book No Logo from 1999 is an important source of inspiration when it comes to this storytelling technique. In the generation-defining book, Klein writes about the journey of cotton from the time it is picked in a field, until it is spun, woven, cut, and sewn into jeans that end up in the clothing store on the corner.
The film The Luckiest Nut in The World is another current example. Here, an animated peanut, song, music and archive recordings are used to tell about the fate that meets nuts from developing countries.
The opening sequence of the Hollywood film Lord of War can also be seen as a condensed biography of a gun cartridge. In the film's opening scene, we follow the production process along the assembly line in a cornerstone company that could just as well have been at Kongsberg or Raufoss. Then the bullet is sold, it is transported in a container across the world's oceans, it goes astray and is transported out to the front. There it is loaded into a weapon, powdered antennas, the bullet goes out through the barrel and penetrates the skull of an African child soldier.
Thus, Minister of Trade and Industry Dag Terje Andersen should see this film. Despite the fact that the Norwegian state owns half of the shares in the ammunition manufacturer Nammo, Andersen does not have an overview of where the bullets produced in Nammo's foreign factory end up. Perhaps Andersen will demand an end-user declaration from the buyers after seeing the film.
Black Gold director Francis says he has chosen the special storytelling technique precisely to raise other issues than those usually discussed in the north-south debate.
-The idea behind Black Gold was to show Africa from a trade perspective instead of repeating the focus on aid; and that in a way that people could relate to, he says and thus connects to a debate that has taken place in Ny Tid this spring, where NRK's TV campaign has been criticized for portraying Africans almost exclusively as passive aid recipients, instead for potential trading partners, who may also have other interests than Norway in trade policy.
Ironic subsidies
Recently, the French newspaper Le Monde defined Norway as ultra-protectionist, and a brake on the ongoing negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO). On 19 May, there appears to be a new WTO meeting, but for the time being, Minister of Agriculture Terje Riis-Johansen rejects the desire of African heads of state for better access to markets and cuts in subsidies in the north. Nick Francis believes subsidies are a problem.
-On the one hand, Western countries subsidize their farmers. But the Western countries that decide in the World Bank do not allow Ethiopia to subsidize its farmers. In addition, poor countries cannot afford large subsidies. It is ironic that the US and the EU, which talk about free trade, are among the countries that subsidize their own farmers the most. Thus, poor countries are outcompeted and never get the opportunity to build a stable and advanced agricultural industry that can increase food production.
Francis thus argues in the same way as Atle Sommerfeldt from Norwegian Church Aid and Dinesh Kulkarni from the Indian farmers union, who on 18 April told Ny Tid that the most important tool for solving the problem of rising food prices is to cut subsidies in rich countries, -land gets the opportunity to build up a strong agricultural sector.
Problems related to global economic structures are often difficult to convey. For Nick Francis, it is important that the film reaches out and engages the traditional cinema audience.
-This film is made with the intention of appealing to people who otherwise do not care about documentaries on this topic. This is a film with a story that is made for screening in cinemas, which draws viewers into the story, he says.
Forced to debate
In Black Gold, we do not just follow the coffee prayer. There is also a human main character in the film. Tadesse Meskela leads Ethiopia's largest trade association, which represents about 100.000 coffee farmers. The film crew constantly followed Tadesse as he worked, visiting the farmers and trying to find buyers. Kristin Skare Orgeret believes this was a necessary move:
-The danger of having only one product in the lead role is that viewers may lose interest. According to classical film theory, you need a main character that the audience lives in. When you follow a product, it is often the human encounters that bring out these dimensions, she says.
There is no doubt that the combination of both an item and a human being in the lead role has had an effect in the case of Black Gold. On the film's website, representatives of the international coffee companies have been forced to participate in the debate forum. The attention has been too great for the companies to stop worrying about the sales figures.
-Starbucks got in touch as it was about to launch at the Sundance festival. "Obviously they were worried that we would damage their reputation, and they showed up at every show to study the reactions of the audience," says Francis.
Starbucks claimed to the media that the film was inaccurate and incomplete.
-They also sent an internal memo to all the group's employees, where they tried to bring the film into disrepute. We did not know this until one of their baristas posted the letter on the film's online forum. When the media heard about the Starbucks letter, it led to a lot of debate in the UK.
As an indirect consequence of Black Gold, farmers' coffee incomes have doubled. Tadesse's cooperatives now receive direct inquiries from independent buyers. But still they only supply the raw materials. There is still a long way to go before Ethiopians can produce a finished coffee product under their own brand, without tax obstacles in the buyer countries.
Norway still has higher tariffs on further processed goods than on raw materials. The more people who watch this film, the more difficult it will be for Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway's chief negotiator in the WTO, to maintain what the Joint Council for Africa calls a neocolonial trade policy.
Fairtrade diversionary maneuver
"Now we notice that the public is getting involved and wants to know what their governments are doing in relation to the WTO," says Nick Francis.
-There are two sides to large companies launching Fair Trade products. Nestlé, for example, gets good PR when they launch their own Fair Trade variant, but on the other hand, more than 98 percent of their products are still sold outside Fair Trade, says Francis.
-Some large companies go down to Ethiopia and build a bridge for the population, are photographed and go home and get PR. They do this for cheap money and a lot of advertising, instead of giving farmers a good price for the product. Farmers perceive this as a condescending attitude. But, I think consumers are now starting to become aware of this tactic.
In the future, there will be more life story stories in cinemas, but not just about goods. The Canadian documentary Life Cycle of An Igloo is currently being produced. It is about the igloo, which has allowed the Inuit to live in one of the plants' least hospitable areas. The film begins in a cloud, with the formation of a single snowflake. From there, it follows the life cycle of what will eventually become an igloo. The film's big question is: Will climate change cause it to melt?
Nick Francis' next project may also end up using the same storytelling technique. The film will be about international finance. The coffee industry has an annual turnover of $ 80 billion. At the same time, $ 250 billion disappears every year from poor countries to banks in the West. Francis plans to follow this financial flow.
So far, globalization means that money and goods are moving faster and faster across national borders. But the new global working class in the south, it stands still – it is stuck. This is one of the great paradoxes of globalization. The goods and money move, but the producers do not get the opportunity to do the same.
Some people manage to get away, and often get a lot of attention in the media in the west, branded as economic refugees and fortune hunters. Nevertheless, only a small minority have the opportunity to travel. Therefore, stories about the life cycle of goods are important to show how the lives of producers ("they") and consumers ("us") are connected – to show that we are all connected in a big we.
