Persistence of Vision

Tonight's screening of Mine Your Own Business at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, wraps up an eight-campus U.S. tour held in association with MPI. Since October 17th, the filmmakers have screened and discussed the film at Michigan State University, Lansing, MI; Ohio State University, Columbus, OH; Indiana University, Bloomington, IN; the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI; Washington University, St. Louis, MO; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN; and Emory University, Atlanta, GA. On November 1st at 6:30 p.m. GMT, the film will have its European premiere at the Institute of Economic Affairs, 1 Great George Street, Westminster, London SW1P 3AA.

Directed by the husband-and-wife pair of Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, Mine Your Own Business reveals the dark side of militant green politics, exposing radical environmentalists' quest to deny lesser developed nations the kinds of economic opportunities that have benefitted the West for centuries. McAleer deftly unmasks the arrogance of those Western activists who would refuse poor people in other countries the right to exploit their natural resources of forests, coal, oil, and gold -- without first consulting locals about what they want or need.

The film tells the story of Gheorghe Lucian, a twenty-three-year-old miner from the village of Rosia Montana in central Romania, where the unemployment rate is 70 percent, and where Gheorghe, his parents, and his four siblings all share a decrepit one-bedroom apartment. Gheorghe himself is unemployed because Western activists -- including millionaire actress Vanessa Redgrave -- are opposing a $750 million open-cast gold mining project that would bring more than six hundred jobs to the area. Illustrating environmentalists' incomprehension of local peoples' wants and needs, McAleer films Belgian activist Francoise Heidebroek stating that Romanian villagers would rather drive horses than cars, and that they prefer peasant lifestyles based around traditional small-scale agriculture. The locals themselves respond differently: Their land is inadequate for farming, they say; they want cars and good jobs; and they desperately need the economic benefits mining would bring.

Gheorghe then travels with the filmmakers to impoverished communities in Madagascar and Chile, where he finds people embittered because their dreams of a decent income, better housing, a quality education, and a better life for their children have been similarly dashed by environmentalist campaigns. Repeatedly astounded by environmentalists' hypocrisy and lack of concern for locals' economic well-being, Gheorghe watches in Madagascar as a World Wide Fund for Nature official shows off his $35,000 catamaran before arguing that economic wealth does not determine happiness.

By bringing this film to eight prominent U.S. universities, the filmmakers have encouraged students to discuss moral questions surrounding economic development, environmental preservation, and Western pietism in the lesser developed world. Above all, they have raised questions about whether Western environmentalists, themselves often the beneficiaries of economic progress, should be denying the poorest people on the planet the good, healthy, and long life most Westerners take for granted. MPI applauds the bold intellectual diversity Mine Your Own Business has brought to America's campuses over the past two weeks, and wishes the film every success in its forthcoming European premiere.

Hammer & Tickle, Ben Lewis' critically acclaimed documentary about the history of humor under communism, has been picked up by Berlin-based media distribution company EYZ Media for theatrical release in Germany. Working with Aktion Mensch, a national welfare organization, EYZ Media will be curating a series of three film festivals between November 2006 and November 2008; they will be dedicated to work, economics, and globalization. Hammer & Tickle's inclusion will mark the film's German premiere and will bring it to over seventy screens across the country. Screenings will be accompanied by lectures and discussion on relevant topics; they will also be publicized as part of a national information campaign.

Ben Lewis initially got the idea for the film while living in Romania and working on a documentary about Nicolae Ceaucescu. Noting that his hosts had a seemingly endless supply of Ceaucescu jokes, Lewis began to wonder if their penchant for political humor was not part of a broader pattern of joke-telling in communist countries. A quick Internet search confirmed his hunch, and the project was launched. Over two years in the making, Hammer & Tickle is the product of Lewis' tireless and resourceful research. As he explained in an interview with the BBC, "It's my baby. Almost every story is primary material -- no one knows the story of the German cabaret troupe who were imprisoned by the Stasi in 1961 for telling bad jokes (bad in both senses). No one knows about the Romanian public transport worker who collected overheard jokes and then analysed his material statistically so he could calculate the speed of the average Romanian communist joke."

Working from George Orwell's observation that under repressive political regimes, jokes are "tiny revolutions," Lewis' film shows how, in the former Soviet bloc, jokes offered people a means of dissenting from state authority during an era when such dissent was strictly forbidden. Offering a means of bridging the gap between individuals' lived experience and official state-issued propaganda, jokes eased the cognitive dissonance of life under communism in ways that were at once culturally important and politically significant. "Jokes were an essential part of the communist experience because the monopoly of state power meant that any act of non-conformity, down to a simple turn of phrase, could be construed as a form of dissent," Lewis explains. "By the same token, a joke about any facet of life became a joke about communism. There have been political and anti-authority jokes in every era, but nowhere else did political jokes cohere into an anonymous body of folk literature as they did under communism."

Hammer & Tickle premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last spring. On October 10, it aired on BBC Four as part of its Storyville series.

Mine Your Own Business has its European premiere tonight at London's Institute of Economic Affairs. In anticipation of the event, Irish journalist Rory Carroll reviewed the film in today's Guardian, calling it "a polemical broadside against what it sees as the duplicity and unaccountability of non-governmental organisations." MPI hopes that this bold, provocative film will spark as much debate in Europe as it already has in the United States.

Writing in the Contra Costa Times, the film's co-director and MPI fellow Phelim McAleer describes how his stint in Bucharest as a foreign correspondent for the London Financial Times led to his and his wife Ann McElhinney's decision to make a hard-hitting documentary film about the darker sides of environmental activism. While covering a campaign against  Gabriel Resources' proposed mine at Rosia Montana, McAleer found Western NGOs telling reporters that the Canadian company planned forcibly to resettle indigenous communities before rapaciously plundering the area's pristine landscapes. But when McAleer visited the village himself, he found that the environmentalists' reports were misleading, exaggerated, or simply untrue:

Rosia Montana was already a heavily polluted village because of the 2,000 years of uncontrolled mining in the area. The new mining company actually planned to use modern methods to clean up the existing mess.

Opposing the new mine would be like opposing a Canadian company from taking over and reopening a rusting factory in a decaying U.S. city. Local people in many U.S. cities would welcome the clean-up, and new technology and jobs the investment would bring. And it is no different in this impoverished and highly polluted part of Romania.

But the environmentalists never pointed this out. They lied about support for the project and pretended there was widespread local opposition. The environmentalists also gathered huge media coverage because of the planned forced resettlement.

But this was simply a bare-faced lie.

The locals, rather than being forcibly resettled as the environmentalists claimed, were queuing up to sell their decrepit houses to the company, which was paying well over the market rate.

McAleer soon uncovered another reason for environmentalists' opposition to the Rosia Montana mine: Romantic idealism. Aware that prosperity would transform traditional Romanian lifestyles, environmentalists felt obliged forcibly to protect those livestyles from Western intrusions -- even if it meant that local peoples continued to live in poverty. As he researched the issue further, he found the same pattern in Africa and South America. "Educated Westerners living in these countries explained to me, in all seriousness, that the locals don't want better food, houses or schools for their children," McAleer notes.

McAleer left the Financial Times in 2003 to become a full-time documentary filmmaker. With funding from Gabriel Resources (who did not interfere editorially with the project) and the Moving Picture Institute, he and Ann McElhinney made Mine Your Own Business to focus international attention on the plight facing some of the world's poorest people. On three continents, the filmmakers found impoverished people consistently longing for good jobs, cars, decent schools, and quality health care. And yet he just as consistently found Western environmentalists declaring that local residents neither wanted nor needed investment from mining companies. "I have come across a lot of tragedies and hard-luck stories as a journalist," McAleer remarks, "but I had never covered a situation where the solution to poverty is being opposed by educated Westerners who think that people really are 'poor but happy.'"

With the film's YouTube trailer currently drawing more than 1,000 hits a day, and the blogosphere buzzing after its U.S. campus tour, Mine Your Own Business is causing a sensation in the United States. MPI anticipates a similar response in Europe. An Australian tour will follow later this month, sponsored by the Institute of Public Affairs.