There may be an awful lot of lawyer jokes out there but for more and more documentary filmmakers, the legal challenges they are up against when trying to tell a story are no laughing matter. Forty years after the initial publishing of The Pentagon Papers, the full truth about Vietnam is finally being released. Daniel Ellsberg has stated that what he did back then as an investigative journalist was actually legal. Today, post-9/11 and Patriot Act, not only would it be illegal, it would be much more difficult to find any published information at all. Some information has indeed disappeared completely. And for those wonderfully stubborn souls who keep searching for the truth and trying to get it out there in front of audiences, they often find themselves, especially in the US, attacked by layer upon layer of lawsuits funded by corporations with deep pockets.
Take the case of Bananas! and the hell the Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten and his producer went through when putting on the screen the stories of workers who were "allegedly" suffering from infertility due to exposure to pesticides while employed by the biggest fruit company in the world. The well-known legal story of Joe Berlinger's never-ending battles with his film about Chevron's pollution and the health affects on people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Crude, overshadowed his message at times. And some turn to fiction to avoid the lawsuits by making feature films such as Michael Clayton which refer to the wrongs of companies such as Monsanto. And the list seems to be growing longer. Documentary filmmakers have enough problems trying to find the money to get their films made, but adding to that the mountains of legal bills and the time-consuming reality of defending oneself and one's film from being sued, one imagines the corporations are hoping that the filmmakers will back down and their docs will disappear.
But they won't.
And that was obvious by the lineup at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in the UK this past week. The screenings were full of both industry folks and regular folks and the conversations in the pubs afterwards showed that documentary film attacking serious subjects is alive and well. But will many of these docs go on to have a life on television and in cinemas?
Full Article
Source: Huffington
Take the case of Bananas! and the hell the Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten and his producer went through when putting on the screen the stories of workers who were "allegedly" suffering from infertility due to exposure to pesticides while employed by the biggest fruit company in the world. The well-known legal story of Joe Berlinger's never-ending battles with his film about Chevron's pollution and the health affects on people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Crude, overshadowed his message at times. And some turn to fiction to avoid the lawsuits by making feature films such as Michael Clayton which refer to the wrongs of companies such as Monsanto. And the list seems to be growing longer. Documentary filmmakers have enough problems trying to find the money to get their films made, but adding to that the mountains of legal bills and the time-consuming reality of defending oneself and one's film from being sued, one imagines the corporations are hoping that the filmmakers will back down and their docs will disappear.
But they won't.
And that was obvious by the lineup at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in the UK this past week. The screenings were full of both industry folks and regular folks and the conversations in the pubs afterwards showed that documentary film attacking serious subjects is alive and well. But will many of these docs go on to have a life on television and in cinemas?
Full Article
Source: Huffington
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