In reflecting on the year in cinema, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis named CRUDE one of her “favorite films of the year.”

Screening in competition alongside other festival favorites including Food, Inc. and The Age of Stupid, Crude received the highest honor at the oldest environmental film festival in Europe!

Crude’s director, Joe Berlinger, was in Paris last week to receive the award.  “I am thrilled that international audiences continue to embrace the film and its important story,” he says. “To be recognized by an institution with as much history as the Environmental International Film Festival is a tremendous gift.”

Click here to see the festival’s complete program.

Our hearts go out to our friends at the Vashon Theatre today, as the Vashon Island, WA cinema, which was scheduled to play CRUDE, had to postpone the screening due to serious equipment theft.  Vashon Theatre managers arrived to work yesterday morning to find that the theater’s digital projector, DVD players, flat screen monitor, cash, and keys had been stolen from the premises.

It is difficult enough for independent theaters to keep afloat in the current economic climate without additional burdens. We’re deeply troubled by the robbery and hope the local police will find the perpetrator(s). If you have any information on the incident, we urge you to contact the local King County authorities at (206) 296 – 3311.

-TEAM CRUDE

Listen to Joe Berlinger on The Bob Edwards Show!  To download click here.

Watch Joe Berlinger, Amazon Defense Coalition’s Luis Yanza, and Chevron’s Don Campbell discuss and debate the case on Al Jazeera International’s Riz Kahn (10.29.2009).

With all of the outrage Crude engenders regarding what happened in Ecuador in the past, one of the things that rarely comes up when discussing the film is the lesson this story can teach us about the future. But George Santayana’s famous adage that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” could not be more apropos.

Many of us on the Crude filmmaking team are based in New York City, where the tap water is some of the cleanest in the country, and a debate is currently raging over drilling for natural gas that could threaten our drinking water.

Our friends at Riverkeeper oppose the drilling plan. Those who support the drilling maintain that with today’s technology, nothing bad could happen.  While the plaintiffs in Ecuador charge that Texaco used practices that were outdated even in the 1960s when drilling there began, are we really so arrogant to think that there will be no errors that could contaminate our reservoirs? And is a resource as vital as clean drinking water really something that we are willing to gamble on?

When looking at the Ecuador story, it’s easy to believe that something like this could never happen here in the U.S. But unfortunately, similar stories are more common than we’d like to think. Communities across the country have been fighting the extractive industries for decades, attempting to hold big business accountable for putting profits ahead of the health and safety of our people and the environment. Just this week, a jury found Exxon Mobil liable for contaminating New York City’s groundwater with a gasoline additive and has awarded the city $105 million.

Crude seems more timely than ever.

-Michael Bonfiglio
Producer/2nd Unit Director

(We are pleased to welcome special guest blogger Peter Maass, acclaimed journalist and author of the new book Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, which includes a chapter on the Ecuador story. Peter sends us a report from the ASPO 2009 International Peak Oil Conference in Denver.)

When a grown man wakes up in the morning and dresses in a yellow chicken suit, he is hopefully heading to work as a mascot for a sports team. Not so with the men in chicken suits whom I saw protesting outside a Denver conference on peak oil on Monday. The guys in yellow were distributing flyers from an energy firm that wanted everyone to know that apparently the sky is not falling in terms of oil supply; there’s more than enough crude out there if only, these talking Chicken Littles said, we would drill baby, drill.

Whether the proponents are dressed as animals or not, one of the annoying aspects of the let’s-drill-more-wells argument is that it doesn’t address the environmental damage in countries that do not have the will or the power to enforce pollution regulations. While researching my book on oil, one of the most ironic sights I came across was in Nigeria, where the extraction facilities in the Niger Delta are akin to high-tech fortresses in a panorama of poverty and violence. I saw oil wells that dripped fluids into the creeks, and my canoe glided on water coated with a film of crude. I nonetheless noticed a sign at one facility, run by Shell, that encouraged everyone to “Keep Nigeria Safe and Clean.”

A consequence of America’s relatively strict environmental regulations (not strict enough for everyone, I know) is that we don’t see and don’t really know the earthly disasters that irresponsible extractive practices cause in other countries. We are, for instance, the largest purchaser of crude from Ecuador, where a terrible mess was left behind by Texaco when it handed over its concession after more than two decades of reckless operations. In environmental terms, the sky has already fallen in Ecuador, where you can smell oil in the air as you drive through the despoiled Oriente region. I hope the men who dressed as chickens, or the people who paid them to do so, take the time on Friday to attend the Denver screenings of “Crude,” Joe Berlinger’s powerful documentary about Ecuador. They can dress however they like.

-Peter Maass

CRUDE opens in Denver at the Landmark Mayan 10/16 for ONE WEEK ONLY https://tickets.landmarktheatres.com/Landmark.aspx?TheatreID=229

We are pleased to announce that Dogwoof Films will be releasing Crude theatrically in the UK beginning January 15th, 2010! Please check back for updates on exact playdates/locations.

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From The Huffington Post October 13, 2009

By Joe Berlinger

Crude’s Important Story, And What You Can Do To Help

For the past month, I’ve been traveling around the country presenting my new film Crude to theatrical audiences, and it has been an incredibly eye-opening and emotional experience.

Crude tells the story of the largest environmental lawsuit on the planet, pitting 30,000 Ecuadorean rainforest residents against Chevron, the world’s fifth-largest company. Making the film was a three-year labor of love — a grueling process that was both physically and emotionally draining. Now that the film is finished and has taken on its own life, bringing it to theatres across the country has been a tremendously rewarding experience, mostly because of the way in which it has changed my view of my fellow citizens. The theatrical release of the film has reminded me of the power of cinema to unite and inspire people, and confirmed my belief that cinema can and should be a communal experience.

The environmental and human rights tragedy that is examined in Crude was allowed to happen because of complacency, greed and an indifference to the environment and to human suffering. What I have seen from audiences in Q&A sessions after the film plays is quite the opposite – a desire to get involved and make a difference.

After the first question, which is invariably, “What can we do to help these people?” I point the audience to our website, where people can donate to the clean drinking water project started by activist (and wife of Sting) Trudie Styler and implemented by UNICEF and the Rainforest Foundation. You can also find out more about a variety of NGOs – including Oxfam, AmazonWatch and Witness – that are doing work to try and change the situation of the thousands of people affected by this, and other, tragedies.

Sometimes, people won’t have a question, but will share their personal feelings about how the film has touched them. A young woman at a screening in New York told us, “I am a lawyer, and seeing this film has made me realize that I might not always have worked on the right side of justice. I need to make some changes in my life.” People have talked about being awakened to how their decisions touch others halfway around the world, and vowed to be more diligent about educating themselves about the companies they support. They have signed petitions, offered donations to the clean water project, and bought our t-shirts, the proceeds of which go directly to that water project. And they have tearfully embraced us, thanking us for introducing them to a story that has changed their lives.

(more…)

Image from Berlinger’s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robinhood Hills (HBO, 1996)

Although this is not about the Ecuador story, please read this article which appeared in yesterday’s New York Times about the West Memphis Three case. This is an important story that is extremely close to our hearts, and was the subject of Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky’s films Paradise Lost, Revelations: Paradise Lost 2, and Paradise Lost 3, which is currently in production. Like the Ecuador/Chevron case, the system is moving extremely slowly, but we hope that increased attention on this tragedy may help push the wheels of justice forward. To learn more about the WM3, please visit www.wm3.org.

-Team CRUDE