If one had to name the product least likely to ever be considered “fair trade,” oil would have to be near the top of the list. While the fair trade movement—a progressive take on the global marketplace that seeks to ensure sustainability and growth for developing economies—has been around for at least half a century, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that it really caught on with the mainstream. Now, you can find “Fair Trade”-stamped goods at nearly every local grocery, gallery, and gift shop. But oil?
That’s the idea behind Equitable Oil, founded by Amherst native David Poritz. Still a student at Brown University when he launched his company, Poritz sought to find a way to reward companies that drilled oil in ways safer and more ethically sensitive than those using traditional methods. His first customer was Petroamazonas, the state-controlled oil concern of Ecuador. Poritz was 22 years old.
Poritz comes to Amherst Cinema this Monday night to discuss a screening of Oil & Water, a film that pairs his story with that of Hugo Lucitante, an Ecuadorian native whose life, like Poritz’ own, is tied up in the oil of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Lucitante’s small Cofan tribe—less than 2,000 people—had come together to send the 10-year-old Hugo to the United States to get a Western education, and filmmakers Laurel Spellman Smith and Francine Strickwerda were already filming his high school graduation when they learned of an oil disaster in his homeland so catastrophic that it was being called a “rainforest Chernobyl.”
It turned out that a teenage Poritz had been involved in a class action suit against Texaco over their involvement in the disaster, and had in fact met Hugo in Ecuador when the curious local offered the young American—a rare sight in the jungle—a ride in his canoe.
Reunited by fate and film, the pair return to Ecuador to tour Hugo’s homeland and document the devastation, each in their own way trying to find some means to avoid a future wholly dependent on the oil that flows beneath Hugo’s tribal home. Smith and Strickwerda follow the story for eight years as the boys become men whose lives become complicated for all sorts of reasons, not all of which involve oil.
Also at Amherst this week, Matthew Warchus’ film Pride tells another story of social justice and the strange bedfellows it sometimes creates. Set in the summer of 1984 in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, it is based on the true story of a group of gay and lesbian activists in London who campaigned to support the mineworkers union during a wide-ranging strike. Ben Schnetzer stars as Mark Ashton, the leader of the activists who pushes his compatriots to expand their activism beyond their own borders. But if he is met with suspicion from within his own ranks—and he is, by those who don’t believe that a miners union would ever do the same for them—he is met with more still from those he wishes to help: the union is reluctant to accept their help.
Rebuffed by the union, Ashton and his clan (including Andrew Scott, recently seen to great effect as the villain Moriarty on the BBC series Sherlock) decide to take their case directly to the miners in need. When they locate a remote mining village in Wales, the group set off in a minibus to bring their donation right to the people who can use it the most. What follows is an unlikely alliance that, like that of a young Ecuadorian and American, reminds us all that great things can be achieved when we look beyond our own closest circles.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com .
