Documenting the struggle against Shell
A conversation with Sweet Crude director Sandy Cioffi
Sweet Crude is the best documentary on a social resistance movement that I have ever seen. While The Weather Underground is a close runner-up, Sweet Crude stands high above the rest as a powerful, incredibly well-made film that picks through the multiple layers of a movement’s history, its divisions, failures, triumphs, tactics, and philosophies. The movement comprises the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta and their decades-long resistance to Shell in the region. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) and other people of the Niger delta area are the focus of Sweet Crude, a film that could have easily been another David vs. Goliath legal battle narrative in the tradition of Bananas, The Coca-Cola Case, and Crude. But director Sandy Cioffi was less interested in Western lawyers and more interested in the diverse, politically involved and extremely articulate individuals who make up the human front against Shell’s environmentally devastating practices in Ogoniland.
The film tells the long struggle of MOSOP and other activists, from the early 80s on. During that time people have organized actions against Shell, a foreign company that has extracted oil from the region for over 20 years earning billions in profit, but has not helped the people of the region lift out of poverty, nor managed to safeguard the environment in the process. Oil contamination is rampant. Gas flares light up the sky constantly, polluting the air and endangering citizens in proximity. The fight against the rapacious actions of Shell came to a head on May 21, 1994, when four Ogoni chiefs including Ken Saro-Wiwa were murdered.
Evidenced in the film, the Ogoni activists accuse the Nigerian government of colluding with Shell – allowing the company to use private militias and imprisoning and executing activists that cause a protracted nuisance to the company. In the course of years of struggle against Shell, the non-violent movement Saro-Wiwa headed has splintered into an armed resistance and a continuing non-violent one. The reasons and suffused political principles behind this schism are thoughtfully teased out in Sweet Crude, providing a clear history that could otherwise confuse anyone exterior to the movement.
via artthreat.net