Black Gold

The documentary by the brothers Marc and Nick Francis follows one man travelling the world to get a fair price for Ethiopia’s coffee growers: Tadesse Meskela, general manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union. It goes with him into the growing regions of Sidamo and Oromia, then moves to the other end of the cup, to the exchanges and the large companies. The picture that emerges is this: coffee is the most traded commodity after oil and the business is worth more than eighty billion dollars, yet what reaches the grower is low enough to make abandoning the fields a reasonable idea. It took three years to make, screened at Sundance, travelled to more than sixty festivals and opened in over forty countries. The single sentence in the record says nothing of that scale.