Amnesty International Film Festival: Canadian conquistadores exposed in Under Rich Earth – by Martin Dunphy (Georgia Straight – November 1, 2012)

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Villagers in a remote Ecuadorian valley band together to repulse rapacious Canucks

The documentary Under Rich Earth, screening at this year’s Vancouver Amnesty International Film Festival, has been in release for a couple of years now, but don’t let that stop you from checking it out if you haven’t already done so.

Popular docs such as Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry and Big Boys Gone Bananas!*, both of which are also part of this latest installment of Amnesty’s local exposition, do a good job of uncovering government and corporate malfeascence.

The appeal of Under Rich Earth—which details the struggle in Ecuador, a putative democracy, of poor farmers against police, politicians, and paramilitaries in the employ of a Canadian mining company—is how it fits into the part of Amnesty’s mandate that commits the volunteer-activist organization to fight against political killings and disappearances.

Neither of those outrages are inflicted on those portrayed here, but the film details the myriad small steps—including corporate spin-doctoring, police co-optation, economic suasion, the division of communities, and, finally, threats, bogus legal charges, and physical intimidation and harm—that often lead to those ultimate violations of human rights.

And it is not uncommon for highly visible and loud opponents of transnational resource-extraction companies, especially those dedicated to oil and minerals such as copper and gold, to be threatened, arrested, harassed, and even assassinated in Central America and South America.

Sadly, also common in those extralegal incidents is the involvement, almost never directly and often through screening layers of associated companies, subsidiaries, and “security” firms, of Canadian mining companies, often with big bucks easily raised on the Toronto Stock Exchange, probably the favourite home for international mining concerns and associated junior exploration companies worldwide.

The film had a bare-bones budget and is, essentially, unscripted and without narration, and that, along with some remarkable footage and a steady vision in the editing process, resulted in a powerfully persuasive product of engaged filmmaking. Toronto director-producer Malcolm Rogge first travelled through remote regions of Ecuador a decade before starting Rich Earth, working on academic research about the effects of oil development.

For the rest of this article, please go to the Georgia Straight website: http://www.straight.com/article-825181/vancouver/vancouver-amesty-international-film-festival-canadian-conquistadores-exposed-under-rich-earth