‘We wanted to put an Ethiopian man in our film as the hero. No-one would fund it’
How do you overcome societal prejudices to film a story that needs to be told? Marc explains the challenges faced in the making of Black Gold.
As a filmmaker, storytelling is my topline. The hook for my films has to be about the story. But my story isn’t always the one that other people want me to tell. Black Gold is one of those stories.
Back in 1999 my brother, Nick, had gone to Ethiopia for a gap year. While he was there, he realised a few things he wasn’t expecting. He learnt that Ethiopia was really rich in coffee and that the country is green like England. That was very contrary to the perception that we had of Ethiopia when we grew up, with Live Aid campaigns and images of starving Africans on billboards getting us to try to give money to Oxfam.
When he reached into it even further he discovered that one of the fundamental reasons why Ethiopia was in a state of poverty was because of the unfair trade that exists between developing countries like Ethiopia and the rest of the world.
Nick got in touch with me and asked if I wanted to get involved in making a film. It was out first project together.
A PHD in poverty
The first thing we did was think about what are all of the factors that affect such poverty in Ethiopia and explored all of them. It was almost like doing a PHD. But we didn’t want to write a PHD, we wanted to tell a story. It took a very long time to find what that story was, and how can we tell it in a way that will appeal to Western society - because why would you go and watch something like that if you couldn’t relate to it. You’ve got enough problems in your own life.
We needed to find one single story that can completely reshape the way people think about poverty in the developing world, that was relevant to us in the West.
What do we care about in the West that can be a connection point to a place like Ethiopia? And then we realised that it was coffee.
Ethiopian coffee farmers were growing what is understood to be some of the best coffee in the world and getting paid a price by the West that was less than the cost of producing it.
So they were starving, and in the West we were happily drinking our expensive coffees in ignorance.
When we realised that it was like ‘Oh my god, that’s it! Somehow, we needed to follow this coffee story, because if you knew that every time you drink a cup of coffee you are somehow contributing to mass global poverty and you could possibly do something about it, then that becomes something you might want to watch.
Finding our Hero
The second challenge that we had is this issue of representation. How can we, at that time in 2003, leverage our position of white male privilege in order to shine a light on people of colour who are doing great things. How could we find heroes and role models who don’t fit that Western stereotype? That other people can also relate to?
We came across Tadesse Meskela. Tadesse was a coffee union rep on a mission to save his 74,000 struggling coffee farmers from bankruptcy. He was passionate, methodical and relentless in his mission and we wanted to give him agency to create the change.
But casting an Ethiopian to be a hero of a story was a revolutionary act.
We were used to seeing the portrayal of Africans as victims and beggars who need the west to campaign to save them, which is often personified in Comic Relief and other campaigns where you see celebrities go in.
I totally have faith in the Western public that they’re capable of listening to someone from a different world talk what’s happening to them. The media narrative didn’t believe that. It didn’t want to take that risk.
So when we went out to get that film funded no-one wanted to fund it. Because who was going to want to watch a film if it’s got an African as a hero.
Instead, we invested a lot of our own time and money and we went to charities and foundations who understood what we were trying to do and did it that way. We tried to make it at cost and for as little money as we possibly could to get charities behind us to be able to do it. It took a couple of years.
Sundance changed everything
Once we had enough material together to show that we had a good story, we got Sundance involved. We got them interested in us and then we got into the Sundance Festival. That’s when everything changed.
Starbucks caught wind and mounted a global PR offensive against us in order to try to discredit the film. They were a sponsor of Sundance and threatened to pull funding from Sundance if they showed the film. But Sundance shut that down.
Starbucks wanted to make sure that when you go into a Starbucks the image that they are putting out there of happy farmers is still in your mind, because they need you to feel good about drinking your cup of coffee. They thought that if Black Gold gets out there in a big way and you realise that coffee farmers are suffering in abject poverty getting less than a cent for a $3 cup of coffee you might not want to go to Starbucks.
And then Proctor and Gamble got involved, one of the largest multi-national companies in the world, a $billion company. Suddenly, we were all over the news calling these companies to account saying, ‘why don’t you just pay a couple of cents more and revolutionise the coffee industry?’ They weren’t going to do that because they are driven by mountain-like profits. They would say ‘we’ve just brought out this new coffee called ‘sustainable coffee’ to help coffee farmers’. But that was just one of their 60 coffee products, released to make us all feel better about the other 59.
So overnight we had become these campaigners of the trade justice movement.
We took the Fairtrade movement into the mainstream and raised the brand value of Ethiopian coffee on the international market. The price then went up for Ethiopian coffee, money came directly to those communities, they were able to build schools, wells, they were able to improve the whole social life of those communities through the release of this film.
A man stood up at the Sundance Festival screening and said ‘How much do the coffee farmers need to finish up building that school in the movie?’ I said $10,000. He came to the bottom of the stage and wrote out a cheque for $10,000.
That showed us that we can make an impact. He did that because he engaged with the humanity of the main character, he had an emotional connection with this man and that’s why he wanted to do something. That’s why I make films.
Subscribe to join me as I explore the human condition in other upcoming projects.