Crude: Who pays the real price of oil?

A movie on how oil giants plunder and pollute the Earth

A new film on the legal battle between Chevron and Ecuador tribes over the oil company's pollution of the fragile environment has turned the focus on the horrible damages caused by oil giants all across the world, especially in Latin America.

Crude takes an inside look at the infamous USD27 billion “Amazon Chernobyl” case. The film is set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, human rights advocacy, the media, multinational corporate power, and rapidly disappearing indigenous cultures.

Film director Joe Berlinger subverts the conventions of advocacy filmmaking as he examines a complicated situation from all angles while bringing an important story of environmental peril and human suffering into focus.

The landmark case takes place in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, pitting 30,000 indigenous and colonial rainforest dwellers against the US oil giant Chevron. The plaintiffs claim that Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, spent three decades systematically contaminating one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth, poisoning the water, air and land. They allege that the pollution has created a “death zone” in an area the size of the Rhode Island, resulting in increased rates of cancer, leukemia, birth defects, and a multiplicity of other health ailments. They further allege that the oil operations in the region contributed to the destruction of indigenous peoples and irrevocably impacted their traditional way of life.

Chevron vociferously fights the claims, charging that the case is a complete fabrication, perpetrated by “environmental con men” who are seeking to line their pockets with the company’s billions. The case takes place not just in a courtroom, but in a series of field inspections at the alleged contamination sites, with the judge and attorneys for both sides trudging through the jungle to litigate.

And the battleground has expanded far beyond the legal process. The cameras rolled as the conflict raged in and out of court, and the case drew attention from an array of celebrities, politicians and journalists, and landed on the cover of Vanity Fair.

Shooting in dozens of locations on three continents and in multiple languages, Berlinger and his crew gained extraordinary access to players on all sides of the legal fight and beyond, capturing the drama as it unfolded while the case grew from a little-known legal story to an international cause célèbre.



Crude is a ground-level view of one of the most extraordinary legal dramas of our time, one that has the potential of forever changing the way international business is conducted. While the environmental impact of the consumption of fossil fuels has been increasingly documented in recent years, Crude focuses on the human cost of our addiction to oil and the increasingly difficult task of holding a major corporation accountable for its past deeds.

Director's take

Joe Berlinger says: "I visited the Ecuadorean Amazon for the first time in 2005, and was shown a shocking ecological disaster. I saw and smelled the foul petrochemical sludge that for decades has been dumped into open pits or directly into the water and soil, a system designed by Texaco when the company began drilling for oil there in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s (in 2001, Texaco was acquired by Chevron)."

"I talked with people who were sick and dying from cancer and other diseases; some of the 30,000 settlers and indigenous people who call themselves los afectados, “the affected ones.” I also met Pablo Fajardo, the remarkable 35-year-old lawyer who was once a poor manual laborer in the oil fields.
Pablo still lives in relative poverty, but today he is the lead attorney in the largest oil-related environmental lawsuit on the planet."

"I left that first trip feeling sick – literally, from the noxious fumes I ingested – and figuratively, from the things I saw and stories I heard. I knew there was an important story to be told, but I quickly realised that if I was going to go through with the extraordinary effort it would take to make a film, I would have to do something different than what might be expected from this kind of environmental story. I wanted to break from the standard formula of an environmental disaster exposé, and create a unique and challenging cinematic experience that brings an audience into a world they probably have never seen before."

"In making this film, I felt it was important not just to show the situation and try to point fingers at a culprit, but to pull back and tell this massive, and massively complicated, story from a wider and more nuanced viewpoint. How did this happen in the first place? What are the roles of corporate power, of government, the media, and big money in a case with the long history and potentially enormous consequences as this one? What does it take to tackle a problem of this magnitude? Is it really as bad as it seems? I knew that to do the story justice and also satisfy my own creative and journalistic impulses, I would have to go beyond simply showing the alleged environmental damage and human suffering and explore the messy, ambiguous process of getting justice in the real world."