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Big Men - Film Review

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Big Men - Film Review

Unread postby Graeme » Sat 15 Mar 2014, 18:52:14

Big Men - Film Review

I saw this movie last night, and also met the Director/Writer/Interviewer Rachel Boynton after the movie. It was very good, balanced, and complex. There's a potentially Georgist angle, never explored, regarding the resource curse, but it's more complicated than that, involving culture, poverty - both before and after the oil is drilled - and aspirations of both oil men and of third world countries like Ghana and Nigeria. The Director said afterwards that she does not see the world in terms of villains and heroes, and the film reflects that lack of judgmentalism. One is left wondering how so many things could go wrong with so many people who felt they were trying to do right, but that is due to the underlying economic corruption of the oil resource business, which the film does not seriously challenge, but merely documents. The clear underdogs are the people of Ghana and Nigeria, who have few opportunities outside the oil industry.

The film ends before it's clear whether the people of Ghana will ultimately see the profits from the oil in their land. In contrast to the Norwegian model, most African nations suffer from the oil curse, where the wealth is not redistributed to the People. A compromise was reached with the impoverished militants to basically pay them off not to destroy oil equipment in Nigeria, but during Q&A, Boynton said the job-training part of the deal was "a joke."

Highly recommended.


opednews

How big oil destroys the world: A real-life saga of greed

Indeed, Boynton always seeks to return the story to a human scale, even when it’s a story of skulduggery, corruption and international finance (three interchangeable terms, one might say), a story that leaps around, soap-opera style, from New York to Dallas to the Niger Delta to the Ghanaian capital, Accra. For instance, it would have been easy for a certain kind of left-wing muckraker to render Jim Musselman, the CEO of a small oil company called Kosmos Energy (does that sound like a CIA front group or what?), as an inherently bad person: He’s a bald, rich, white guy from Texas who stands to become a whole lot richer after Kosmos’ gamble on Ghanaian oil turns into a winning lottery ticket. When he shows up to greet a Ghanaian tribal chief bearing bottles of Scotch and Hennessey and a $10,000 donation for an educational charity (whether or not this is a bribe remains unclear), it’s pretty easy for the viewer to start edging toward contempt.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. H. G. Wells.
Fatih Birol's motto: leave oil before it leaves us.
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Re: Big Men - Film Review

Unread postby Graeme » Wed 02 Apr 2014, 20:25:15

Here is what the Guardian thought of this movie:

The phrase "striking oil" carries two dictionary definitions: the formal, to "discover petroleum while digging for it"; and the informal, "to become very rich or successful". In real life, the two aren't always as neatly tallied.

The story of West Africa's oil rush over the past half-century or so painfully illustrates the mixed fortunes that so-called black gold can bring. Nowhere is its tarred hand more in evidence than Nigeria, the continent's largest crude oil exporter.

The populous African nation has become a byword for what economists refer to as the "resource curse". Endemic corruption and poor public governance have seen billions of dollars in oil revenue simply disappear. After nearly six decades of oil production, Nigeria languishes in 153rd place (out of 187 countries) in the United Nation's Human Development Index.

Enter Ghana. The West African country hit "lucky" in 2007. A bold exploration gamble by Dallas-based oil firm Kosmos Energy turned up a huge oil field about 60km off the Ghanaian coast. With a whopping 600m barrels of light crude in estimated reserves, the Jubilee Field catapulted the country into the oil game.

Big Men, which was screened at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London earlier last week, picks up the story. What unfolds is a deftly chronicled depiction of what happens when Africa, oil and Wall Street meet. Despite some artful cinematography and a colourful cast (replete with bejewelled tribal chiefs, sharp-suited investors and daredevil prospectors), the result isn't a pretty sight.

"It's every entity for itself", says Rachel Boynton, the documentary's US-based director. This desperate scramble for personal gain marks a binding motif of the movie. "In that sense, conflict is inevitable."
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. H. G. Wells.
Fatih Birol's motto: leave oil before it leaves us.
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