The buzz about MPI-funded film Mine Your Own Business continues to grow -- and the mainstream media has begun to listen.
Newsweek is the latest to cover the sensational film by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. Noting that the premise of the film "sounds like something out of the next 'Borat' movie: a Romanian miner and an Irish filmmaker hop a plane to Madagascar, and then to Chile, to make the case that racist and arrogant environmentalists are keeping poor people down," Daren Briscoe goes on to summarize the film and to tell the story behind the making of a "a new documentary being hailed in some quarters, and scorned in others, as big business’s answer to Al Gore’s 'An Inconvenient Truth'":
The film opens in the Romanian town of Rosia Montana. Gold has been mined there since pre-Roman times, and now the Gabriel Resources company is seeking government approval to build a massive open-pit mine to leach gold from ground-up rock with a cyanide solution. The proposed mine has become a cause célèbre among environmental groups, who say it would pollute the area, force thousands of locals from their homes and destroy a historic town. In 2004, Hungarian filmmaker Tibor Kocsis made a documentary called “New Eldorado (Gold—the Curse of Rosia Montana),” that made similar claims. That film won the Hungarian Film Critics award for Best Documentary and the Hungarian Film Week - Best Documentary award, among others. But when Gabriel Resources CEO Alan Hill watched “New Eldorado,” he told NEWSWEEK, “I was ragged with frustration within the first five minutes. There was so much innuendo, so many lies. I saw a movie put out by unaccountable [non-governmental organizations] and I wanted to refute it.”Hill decided to order up a documentary of his own, envisioning a point-for-point rebuttal of the Kocsis film. What he got instead was Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, husband-and-wife filmmaking fellows at the New York-based Motion Picture Institute [sic], whose mission, executive director Rob Pfaltzgraff told NEWSWEEK, is “to use film to expand the cause of freedom and classic liberalism. We’re absolutely committed to stimulating debate and discussion.” McAleer, a former Romania/Bulgaria correspondent for the Financial Times, and McElhinney, a former journalist with the BBC, agreed to produce Hill’s documentary, “but we were categorically against [him] having any editorial control,” Pfaltzgraff told NEWSWEEK.
The movie that resulted “wasn’t what I wanted,” Hill says, but he’s more than happy with it.
Briscoe's review of MYOB concludes on an ambivalent note--"the only unvarnished truth the film lays bare is that it’s impossible for a layperson to wade through enough evidence to reconcile all of the competing claims of McAleer vs. the environmentalists." But the fact of the review itself speaks to a broader truth: that anyone interested in environmental issues should not content themselves with merely swallowing the message of Greenpeace, Al Gore, and others wholesale, but should also make it their business to consider competing views offered by work such as Mine Your Own Business.
That's why, as the article notes, MPI is currently working to make copies of MYOB available to teachers. "Jim Wilson, MPI’s project director, said the group would like to ship copies of 'Mine Your Own Business' to every school that's shown 'An Inconvenient Truth' to students. 'We’re looking to pattern our project off of theirs,' Wilson said."
To arrange a screening of MYOB in your community, contact jim@thempi.org.