Ton van Zantvoort: A Blooming Business
It is actually ”a dirty business” to be interpreted in different ways: the use of chemicals in the flower farms and the consequent pollution of the Kenyan Lake Naivasha, and the abuse of people living there who have no labour rights, very low salary, long hours of hard work, sometimes unprotected against the spraying of chemicals… and so on, so forth. But the film pleasantly refrains from shouting to its audience, on the contrary the director treats the subject in a careful way, in a low voice bringing the mentioned terrifying information to the spectators through the characters, he has chosen, who are the ones with whom we get linked emotionally:
The mother with three children who gets up early in the morning to make breakfast and who goes to work and comes back late evening to cook again and be with her children. The fisherman who claims that the water is polluted because of the chemicals from the farms. The man who sells water (from the lake!) and transports it around on donkeys. The young filmmaker-to-be who has filmed inside the farms and wants his footage to be shown all over the world instead of the lying news reports from BBC and other Western tv stations. And others…
I learned something I did not know about, I met some people whose life situation is tragic and I was touched and informed in an intelligent non-sensational cinematographically beautiful manner. Thanks!
Have a look at the site of the film, a very well designed and informative piece of work – and did you know that 300.000 people work in the flower industry!
Holland, 52 mins., 2009 (next bigger festival: DOKLeipzig)
