Two directors take on oil industry

Two movies. Same subject. Almost identical titles. Made independently by two filmmakers who have known each other since 1982. Yet two very different films (and filmmakers). How could that be?

“Crude,” by Joe Berlinger (“Brother’s Keeper”), and “Sweet Crude,” by Sandy Cioffi, are new documentaries about the despoiling of the third world by multinational oil companies (Ecuador in “Crude,” Nigeria in “Sweet Crude”). Focusing on similar subjects isn’t that odd in the nonfiction film world. But the Berlinger-Cioffi coincidences border on the uncanny. Both directors graduated from Colgate University in the early 1980s, took the first film course offered at the college and left their decidedly non-cinema-centric school to pursue careers in documentaries.


But Berlinger and Cioffi represent two sides of the documentary coin. For some practitioners the medium is cinema based in reality. For others it is a tool to promote social and political change. Like many first-rate nonfiction filmmakers, Errol Morris being a prime example, Berlinger, 47, has used commercial work to bankroll his artistic agenda. For Cioffi, 46, a tenured professor of film and video at Seattle Central Community College, film has been more about politics than about making a living. Her experience in Nigeria became a personal journey reflected on film.

Originally intending to make a movie about the building of a library in the Niger Delta, she became involved in the political struggle there, making efforts to get the message of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta into the global conversation. In the process, she was arrested by the Nigerian military.

IHT