Crude

Can 30,000 plaintiffs from five Indigenous Ecuadoran tribes find justice from Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil producers? Who is responsible for the unconscionable dumping of 18 billion gallons of toxic oil waste in the Ecuadoran Amazon, poisoning the most biodiverse place on the planet? Filmmaker Joe Berlinger’s latest documentary picks up the thread of the infamous ""Amazon Chernobyl"" case, a 13-year-old battle between communities nearly destroyed by oil drilling and development and one of the biggest companies on earth. In a sophisticated take on the classic David and Goliath story, Berlinger took three years to craft a cinema vérité portrait centering on the charismatic lawyers in the U.S. and Ecuador who have doggedly pursued the case against all of the forces a corporation can bring into courts of law. Though the Ecuadorans and their perspective receive the lion's share of screen time, the film makes a concerted effort to show the case from all sides: from the scientists and lawyers employed by Chevron, to Ecuadoran judges, to celebrity activists and humanitarian organizers, to the role of the media, to the dramatic intervention of Rafael Correa himself, the first Ecuadoran president to sympathize with the Indigenous perspective. In a tale that spans the globe, Crude looks beyond compassion for the disenfranchised and the corruption of those in power to ask how justice itself is being defined in the twenty-first century.
CAST

Joe Berlinger - Joe Berlinger's feature-documentary career began with the 1992 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award–winning documentary Brother's Keeper. Additional credits include Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, both of which also screened at Sundance. He wrote and directed the Emmy Award–nominated Gray Matter, directed numerous episodes of the critically acclaimed Sundance Channel series Iconoclasts, and won an Emmy for the History Channel miniseries Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America. Berlinger is also the recipient of Peabody, DGA, and Independent Spirit Awards.

Screenings:

Sun. Jan 18 6:00 p.m. - CRUDE18TE Temple Theatre, Park City
Mon. Jan 19 8:30 a.m. - CRUDE193M Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City
Wed. Jan 21 6:00 p.m. - CRUDE21TE Temple Theatre, Park City
Thu. Jan 22 9:45 p.m. - CRUDE22BN Broadway Centre Cinemas V, SLC
Fri. Jan 23 noon - CRUDE23TD Temple Theatre, Park City
Sat. Jan 24 3:00 p.m. - CRUDE24SA Screening Room, Sundance Resort