Thursday, November 12, 2009 - i know about Joe through his documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. But this story is a whole new direction for Joe.
I spoke with Joe recently about his new film which plays more like a thriller than a documentary. Joe says CRUDE is not an anti-oil film. It's "an anti-corporate irresponsibility" film. LISTEN TO OUR CONVERSATION BELOW.
SEE: CRUDE plays at Cinema 21 11/13. Joe Berlinger will be on h and for the 7p showing.
Spirit Award-winning filmmaker Joe Berlinger thinks of himself as a storyteller first and a journalist second, which explains why his documentaries are more cinematic than the norm. With his best friend and frequent collaborator Bruce Sinofsky, Berlinger has co-directed some of the more complex and gripping American docs in recent years, including the bizarre murder-trial exposés "Brother's Keeper" and "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" (along with the latter's sequel), and the metalhead therapy session "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster."
But now Berlinger steps out on his own with "Crude," a heartbreaking and compellingly multifaceted epic about the so-called "Amazon Chernobyl" case, in which 30,000 Ecuadorians -- many from the Cofán Indian tribe -- have spent three decades battling Texaco (now Chevron since 2001) for contaminating their water, land and air with a sludgy "death zone" the size of Rhode Island. Advocacy docs can sure sound like homework, but in Berlinger's hands, the courtroom drama, field inspection, celebrity benefit concert and passionate participation all develop as thrilling real-time events, and the director is fair and wise to give Chevron their chance to represent themselves in the film. (Or, more like, giving them rope and standing back.) I spoke with Berlinger about his unlikely participation in the project, the impotence of advocacy docs, and why he and Sinofsky mostly now work independently of one another.
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