Big Boys Gone Bananas!*

The Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten made a documentary called Bananas! about a lawsuit that Nicaraguan banana workers brought against the Dole Food Company. The film was selected for the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2009. Then it was suddenly pulled from competition, a business paper ran a piece against it, and letters of legal threat arrived from the company's lawyers. Gertten turned the camera this time on what was happening to him. The film that came out of it is a step-by-step record of a corporation trying to silence a documentary. There is a name for that kind of case: a strategic lawsuit against public participation. The court in Los Angeles eventually found Dole's claim without merit and ordered the company to pay the costs. The film enters the argument about free expression as a concrete case.