Joe Berlinger on Sundance's Meet The Artist

Crude is a David and Goliath story of a lawsuit against Texaco for allegedly having dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon region of Ecuador over a 30 yr period creating a cancer death zone the size of Rhode Island.

But a young lawyer who actually worked in the oil fields as a kid and saw the devastation decided that he would not allow his economic situation to get in the way, he became the leading lawyer in this incredible lawsuit – it’s the largest lawsuit against a big corporation in history.

Not only is it an important environmental story but it plays like a movie, it is a real who dunnit, it unfolds in the present tense like a great dramatic feature and yet it’s a documentary.

There was a price to pay for all the access – we had our hotel rooms broken into, we had stuff stolen, we got a terrible case of the chiggers and if you don’t know what the chiggers are you don’t want to know, I still have the scars from them, it’s hot as hell down there, you’re at the equator, it’s a malaria zone.

And the most disheartening of course is that this area that was once paradise, one of the most bio-diverse places on earth, is just ravaged by oil pollution. You smell it, you go back to your hotel room and you have a splitting headache, your eyes are burning. I made this film because I went down there, I saw the region, I looked into people’s eyes and I saw just a terrible need to tell their story because these people have suffered for decades.

What I hope that this film does is raises the debate about how you bring the responsible people to task. How do you clean up this mess but more importantly how do you help affected people? And most importantly to see the interconnection between all of us.

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