Hi all,

until now MCR has been a bit of a hobby, but more recently I have been getting a niggling feeling all is not perfect in paradise. Reality is that there is a disparity between our kicking back enjoying a long macciato in the CBD, and the farmers who produce the coffee. A new movie about this issue called Black Gold. It has gotten rave reviews at the sundance film festival. Here’s a snippet from the director:

“We were provoked to make a film about coffee after it was announced at the end of 2002, that Ethiopia was facing another famine. Twenty years earlier people across the world had been motivated to respond to this crisis in Ethiopia. But still, even now nothing seems to have changed. We wanted to fire up a western audience to realize that the problem had not gone away. But this time we wanted to find a way to make it connect to our every day lives. Read the snipped form the directors below:

“Our hope was to make a film that forced us, as western consumers, to question some of our basic assumptions about our consumer lifestyle and its interaction with the rest of the world. And in doing so, we wanted to challenge the way in which the Western media bombards its audiences with an overload of de-contextualised images depicting poverty in Africa with no link to our own lives. ….”

We are talking to the producers of the movie about what we can do, and have also renamed the coffee club pod to “Black Gold” as a group that shares knowledge and ideas regarding how MCR can help locally. IF you are interested, join black gold off Podmatcher.com.

Peter