Lawyers arguing at a particularly damaged site.
At first dragged in “kicking and screaming,” CRUDE was not a film Joe thought he would ever make. Today’s Huffington Post features an interview with the filmmaker in which he explains how he reluctantly came to realize CRUDE was a story he had to tell.
Some highlights:
“They were using a giant vat of canned tuna from the Ecuador equivalent of Costco,” Berlinger recalls. “Now these were indigenous people who had sustained themselves off the waterway for literally millennia. But they couldn’t eat the fish because the fish were all dead or poisoned and so they had to eat canned tuna.
“That image, more than anything, spoke to me. I felt like the universe was tapping me on the shoulder, saying, you have skills and you need to use them to tell this story. How could I go back and turn my back on those people?”
For the complete story of Joe’s journey, read the interview here.
